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The time to hack-proof the 2018 election is expiring — and Congress is way behind
Lawmakers are scrambling to push something — anything — through Congress which would help secure the U.S. voting systems ahead of the 2018 elections. It might, however, already be too late for some critical targets. By this point during the 2016 election cycle, Russian government hackers had already breached the Democratic National Committee’s networks for at least three months.
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Shining more light every day on Russia’s political interference
“Despite this clear threat to American democracy, and the unanimous assessment of the intelligence community that Russia interfered in the election in an operation ordered by Vladimir Putin, real discussion of how to halt these activities and prevent them in the future is only beginning now. This is partly driven by a continued partisan divide on the issue — which is being fueled by the Kremlin’s ongoing influence efforts and Putin’s own denials to President Donald Trump. Trump’s repeated statements casting doubt on his own intelligence community’s assessment and the unwillingness of many Republican leaders to defend the truth continue to fan these partisan flames. Allowing Russian interference to become a partisan issue plays right into Russia’s hands and achieves Putin’s goals,” Laura Rosenberger and Jamie Fly write. “This is not about relitigating who won the election. Trump is the president. This is about defending American democracy from attacks by foreign enemies.”
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Uber admitted to covering up massive data breach
Uber chief executive posted a message on the company’s blog, admitting that an October 2016 cyberattack allowed the hackers to collect personal information like names, driver license numbers, email addresses, phone numbers and more on 57 million Uber users and drivers around the world, including 600,000 Uber drivers in the U.S. The company paid the ransom the hackers demanded; asked them to sign a nondisclosure agreement and keep quiet about the breach; and then dressed up the breach as a “bug bounty,” the practice of paying hackers to test the strength of software security.
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Russia sees U.S.-led international order as a threat to its security, interests: Report
Russia seeks to undermine elements of the current international order because its leaders and analysts see the current international order as dominated by the United States and a threat to their country’s security and interests, according to a new RAND report. U.S. officials have repeatedly described the development of a U.S.-led “rules-based international order,” composed of international economic institutions, bilateral and regional security organizations and liberal political norms, as a core U.S. national interest.
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Russian government’s fission know-how hard at work in Europe
The objective of Russia’s broad, systematic disinformation and cyberattacks campaign against Western democracies is ambitious. Moscow has made fragmenting Europe into one of its primary strategic objectives. Dividing European populations from within and turning them against one another via targeted influence operations is a central component of this overarching strategic objective.
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Russian-operated bots posted millions of social media posts, fake stories during Brexit referendum
More than 156,000 Twitter accounts, operated by Russian government disinformation specialists, posted nearly 45,000 messages in support of the “Leave” campaign, urging British voters to vote for Brexit – that is, for Britain to leave the European Union. Researchers compared 28.6 million Russian tweets in support of Brexit to ~181.6 million Russian tweets in support of the Trump campaign, and found close similarity in tone and tactics in the Russian government’s U.K. and U.S. efforts. In both cases, the Russian accounts posted divisive, polarizing messages and fake stories aiming to raise fears about Muslims and immigrants. The goal was to sow discord; intensify rancor and animosity along racial, ethnic, and religious lines; and deepen political polarization — not only to help create a public climate more receptive to the populist, protectionist, nationalist, and anti-Muslim thrust of both Brexit and the Trump campaigns, but also to deepen societal and cultural fault lines and fractures in the United Kingdom and the United States, thus contributing to the weakening of both societies from within.
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Russia has been cyber-attacking “U.K. media, telecommunications, and energy sectors”: U.K. cybersecurity chief
Ciaran Martin, CEO of the U.K. National Cyber Security Center (NCSC): “I can confirm that Russian interference, seen by the National Cyber Security Center, has included attacks on the U.K. media, telecommunications and energy sectors. That is clearly a cause for concern — Russia is seeking to undermine the international system.”
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Russia “weaponized information” to sow discord in West, destroy post-WWII international order: Theresa May
U.K. prime minister Theresa May, in an extraordinary attack on Russia’s broad cyber-campaign against Western countries, has accused Russia of meddling in the elections of Western democracies and planting fake stories in other countries’ media in a sustained effort to “weaponize information” in order to sow discord and deepen internal conflicts Western democracies. May, speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on 13 November 2017, said that Russia’s goal was to destabilize, if not destroy, the post-Second World Order rules-based international order.
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Russia has been cyber-attacking “U.K. media, telecommunications, and energy sectors”: U.K. cybersecurity chief
Ciaran Martin, CEO of the U.K. National Cyber Security Center (NCSC): “I can confirm that Russian interference, seen by the National Cyber Security Center, has included attacks on the U.K. media, telecommunications and energy sectors. That is clearly a cause for concern — Russia is seeking to undermine the international system.”
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Anatomy of a fake news scandal
On 1 December 2016, Alex Jones, the Info-Wars host, a conspiracy-theories peddler, and a fervent Trump booster, was reporting that Hillary Clinton was sexually abusing children in satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant. How was this fake story fabricated and disseminated? “We found ordinary people, online activists, bots, foreign agents and domestic political operatives,” Reveal’s researchers say. “Many of them were associates of the Trump campaign. Others had ties with Russia. Working together – though often unwittingly – they flourished in a new ‘post-truth’ information ecosystem, a space where false claims are defended as absolute facts. What’s different about Pizzagate, says Samuel Woolley, a leading expert in computational propaganda, is it was ‘retweeted and picked up by some of the most powerful faces of American politics’.”
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NATO launches Cyber Operations Center
Russia’s successful cyber-interference on behalf of its favored candidates, partiers, and causes in the United States, France, the Netherland, Germany, and the United Kingdom; its effective cyberattacks on infrastructure facilities in Ukraine and the Baltic states; and the growing cyberthreats from China, North Korea, and Iran, have convinced the member states of NATO that these threats must be met in a more systematic and comprehensive fashion.
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Extremist content and Russian disinformation online: Working with tech to find solutions
“It’s been more than a year since my colleagues and I described in writing how the Russian disinformation system attacked our American democracy. We’ve all learned considerably more since then about the Kremlin’s campaigns, witnessed their move to France and Germany and now watch as the world worst regimes duplicate their methods. Yet our country remains stalled in observation, halted by deliberation and with each day more divided by manipulative forces coming from afar. The U.S. government, social media companies, and democracies around the world don’t have any more time to wait. In conclusion, civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
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Biology can show us how to stop hackers
“Biology is the true science of security. And by that I mean that organisms have had to contend with adversaries and competitors from the very beginning of their evolutionary history. As a result, they’ve evolved an incredible repertoire of defense systems to protect themselves,” says an expert on biology and computation. “Looking at how biological systems have learned to protect themselves can suggest novel approaches to security problems,” ASU’s Professor Stephanie Forrest says. “What I try to do is look at biological mechanisms and principles and translate those mechanisms and architectures into computational algorithms that protect computers.”
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Russia’s pro-Trump campaign began early, aiming to help him win GOP primaries: WSJ
The U.S. intelligence community cited December 2015 as the earliest suspected time that Russian government social media account began their broad campaign in support of Donald Trump. A Wall Street Journal investigation reveals that the Kremlin’s campaign of support for Trump began six months earlier, in June 2015, days after he announced his candidacy. This earlier Russian disinformation campaign was aimed to help Trump defeat his Republican primary rivals. This early campaign, however, already engaged in dissemination of fake stories aiming to tarnish Hillary Clinton and undermine her campaign.
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The challenge of authenticating real humans in a digital world
There are three main ways of proving an identity. One involves something you know – like a password or your mother’s maiden name. A second method of authentication is with something you have – such as a key to your home’s front door or a smart card to swipe at work. A third way is by digitally authenticating the individual human being – who you are – with some aspect of your biology. This increasing dependence on digital authentication may actually result in less security. While cameras, sensors and other devices can make authentication easier for people to accomplish, they carry their own weaknesses. It may be more convenient, and even more secure, than a magnetic strip on a plastic card in your wallet. But the potential dangers will require much higher security for private information, particularly biometric data. A real identity still comes down to flesh and blood.
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More headlines
The long view
States Rush to Combat AI Threat to Elections
This year’s presidential election will be the first since generative AI became widely available. That’s raising fears that millions of voters could be deceived by a barrage of political deepfakes. Congress has done little to address the issue, but states are moving aggressively to respond — though questions remain about how effective any new measures to combat AI-created disinformation will be.
Ransomware Attacks: Death Threats, Endangered Patients and Millions of Dollars in Damages
A ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a company that processes 15 billion health care transactions annually and deals with 1 in 3 patient records in the United States, is continuing to cause massive disruptions nearly three weeks later. The incident, which started on February 21, has been called the “most significant cyberattack on the U.S. health care system” by the American Hospital Association. It is just the latest example of an increasing trend.
Chinese Government Hackers Targeted Critics of China, U.S. Businesses and Politicians
An indictment was unsealed Monday charging seven nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for their involvement in a PRC-based hacking group that spent approximately 14 years targeting U.S. and foreign critics, businesses, and political officials in furtherance of the PRC’s economic espionage and foreign intelligence objectives.
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks
Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.