LA: New Earthquake Fault Risk | Terrorism Watchlist Ruling | New Fake-News Worry for Instagram, and more

Why a Judge’s Terrorism Watchlist Ruling is a Game Changer: What Happens Next (Jeffrey Kah, Just Security)
United States District Judge Anthony J. Trenga issued an opinion last Wednesday that should send a shiver down the spine of those invested in the United States’ system of terrorist watchlists. As Shirin Sinnar insightfully commented for Just Security last week, the opinion grants summary judgment to twenty-three United States citizens whose lives were upended by interferences with their freedom of movement that ranged from additional (often harrowing) security screening experiences at land borders and ports-of-entry, to denial of access to commercial airline flights.

Cyber Command’s Biggest VirusTotal Upload Looks to Expose North Korean-Linked Malware (Shannon Vavra, Cyberscoop)
U.S. Cyber Command’s largest-ever upload to VirusTotal exposes malware linked with North Korean government hackers, according to security researchers.

Ebola Is Raging Again — and the U.S. Is Not Ready (Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, Chicago Tribune)
Despite assurances that our country would be able to handle such a serious disease, our public health agencies and health care institutions made some serious mistakes five years ago when the virus broke through inadequate systems in West Africa.

At Ground Zero, Homeland Chiefs Say Cyber Is Top Future Threat (Dean DeChiaro, Roll Call)
Nearly 18 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, three former secretaries of Homeland Security gathered at ground zero on Monday and pressed the government to prioritize cybersecurity risks as one of the top threats to the United States.
Janet Napolitano, who led the Department of Homeland Security under former President Barack Obama, urged officials to apply greater creativity to cybersecurity in an effort to avoid the failure of “imagination” that the 9/11 Commission said might have prevented the 2001 airliner attacks.
“Perhaps it is time for the country to have a 9/11 Commission for cyber before we have massive ransomware attacks conducted around the country or where we suffer, once again, a direct attack on our democracy,” she said in reference to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

States Still Not Up to Snuff on Election Security, Researchers Warn (Tim Starks, Politico)
More than half of state election commissions use outdated systems such as Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 servers, according to a report released today by cybersecurity firm NormShield. Four commissions used Windows 2003 servers — a legacy system that Microsoft no longer supports. DHS sent out an alert in 2014 warning that running Windows 2003 puts organizations at greater risk of cyberattacks, and Microsoft announced early this year that it would end support of Windows 2008 on Jan. 14, 2020.
Researchers discovered that nearly 60 percent of commissions had missing Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, or DMARC, records that help prevent spoofing attacks via email. More than 40 percent of commissions had at least one website with an invalid or expired SSL certificate used to create an encrypted connection. The company also found nearly a third of election commissions have at least one asset that is reported by blacklist databases that could increase risks for botnet and spam attacks, according to the report.
NormShield examined data for all 50 states, D.C. and five U.S. territories and focused on the “internet facing infrastructure that supports state election processes,” according to the report, excluding the use or cyber hygiene for voting machines. NormShield provided its findings to the secretaries of state and election commissions in July and found “significant improvements” of several election commissions the following month in a second analysis.

Right-Wing Network One America News Sues Rachel Maddow For Calling it “Paid Russian Propaganda” (AP)
The right-wing news network One America News, which counts Donald Trump among its fans, is suing MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for $10 million after she called the channel “paid Russian propaganda.” On her July 22 show, Maddow referred to a report in The Daily Beast that revealed an OAN employee also worked for state-operated Sputnik. “In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda … Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russiangovernment to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said. In the lawsuit, which was reported by AP, OAN said its reporter Kristian Rouz was a freelancer for Sputnik, not an employee. In the lawsuit, Rouz stated: “I have never written propaganda, disinformation, or unverified information.” Amy Wolf, an attorney for NBCUniversal News Group, is quoted writing that OAN “publishes content collected or created by a journalist who is also paid by the Russian government.”

New Fake-News Worry for Instagram (Alexi McCammond, Axios)
Instagram could become a new platform for the sharing of disinformation around the 2020 election because of the way propagandists are relying on images and proxy accounts to create and circulate fake content, leading social intelligence experts tell Axios.