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Can the United States Deter Election Meddling?
The 2020 election is still a year away, but law enforcement officials are already sounding the alarm about foreign interference in the election. Leaders of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities warn that Moscow is preparing to launch a similar effort next year. Joshua Rovner writes that cyber-meddling is a challenge, but that we should not despair.
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The Senate Examines Threats to the Homeland
On Tuesday, Nov. 5, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the evolving threats facing the United States. In their written and opening remarks, the witnesses outlined a dizzyingly broad array of threats—from domestic and international terrorism to transnational organized crime, cyber and economic espionage, election interference, data insecurity, and potential chemical and biological attacks on the homeland. As the hearing wore on, senators’ questions and witness testimony narrowed in scope, focusing primarily on three aspects of America’s security challenges: how to optimize information sharing to combat domestic terrorism; how to counter Chinese cyber and counterintelligence operations; and how to address the growing problems posed by new technologies, namely, ransomware, cryptocurrency and unmanned aerial systems (UASs).
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Disinformation Agents Are Targeting Veterans in Run-Up to 2020 Election
Disinformation campaigns are targeting U.S. veterans through social media, seeking to tap the group’s influential status in their communities and high voting turnout in order to influence elections and fuel discord. Katerina Patin writes that veterans present an ideal target for foreign actors. In addition to their social status and voting rate, veterans are also more likely to run for office and more likely to work in government than any other demographic.
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U.S. Security Leaders Warn About Russian, Iranian Interference in 2020 Polls
Top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials have joined together to warn Americans about attempts by Russia, Iran, and other foreign “adversaries” to interfere with next year’s presidential election. “Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment, and affect government policies,” the leaders of the Trump’s administration on security matters said in a joint statement released on 5 November. “Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions,” they added.
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Are Journalists Ready for Foreign Interference in 2020?
Last month, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released volume two of its investigation into Russian interference, which details an extensive campaign that aims to sow division and undermine American democracy via social media. One of Russia’s key strategies is to target journalists. As the report describes, “Information warfare, at its core, is a struggle over information and truth. A free and open press — a defining attribute of democratic society — is a principal strategic target for Russian disinformation.” By targeting journalists and news outlets in democratic countries, authoritarians weaken a key pillar of democratic societies.
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Inside the Microsoft Team Tracking the World’s Most Dangerous Hackers
When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the U.S. military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?
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Officials Just Had Their Last Chance to Road Test Elections Before 2020
From a security perspective, Tuesday’s odd-year election went off without a hitch: Officials didn’t spot any major disruptions from hacking or disinformation campaigns. But Joseph Marks writes that the fight to protect the 2020 contest is only ramping up. And officials were quick to warn that it will be a far juicier target for foreign actors.
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Using Algorithms to Seek Out Voter Fraud
Concerns over voter fraud have surged in recent years, especially after federal officials reported that Russian hackers attempted to access voter records in the 2016 presidential election. Administrative voting errors have been reported, too; for example, an audit by state officials revealed that 84,000 voter records were inadvertently duplicated by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in the 2018 June primary election. Researchers are helping with the situation by developing new algorithms for tracking voter data.
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Foreign Money Flows into U.S. Politics
Untold amounts of foreign donations are flowing into America’s political system, with little accountability or limits. Although election experts say it’s impossible to accurately estimate the extent of foreign financial influence over U.S. elections, many agree it has increased substantially since a landmark Supreme Court ruling nearly a decade ago opened the flood gates.
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Depoliticizing Foreign Interference
Russian interference in the 2016 election was one of the most effective and dangerous foreign operations ever conducted against the United States. Even worse, the risk of foreign meddling is likely to grow in the coming years. Jessica Brandt writes with just a year left before the next presidential election, U.S. leaders are still grappling with foreign interference in the last election. Postmortems of the 2016 campaign—in testimony from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a bipartisan report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—have brought renewed attention to the ongoing risks, which have been made more difficult by new actors and new technologies. “As the threat has grown, the political polarization that surrounds election interference has deepened,” she writes, adding:. “Despite this bleak picture, progress is possible.
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Are We Making Cyber Ransoms Worse?
Nobody intends to become a hostage. Rather than facing a masked gunman or mafioso hinting at misfortune, these days trouble begins with an email. The link may not work, or there may be a cryptic ransom note demanding an exorbitant payment in cryptocurrency. A frantic phone call from the IT department will follow. It is the call every business leader fears: Your computer system has been breached and data has been stolen or locked up with encryption that cannot be broken. This scenario is not far-fetched. It is not even uncommon.
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As Russia Makes 2020 Play, Democratic Campaigns Say They Are in the Dark, and Experts Fear U.S. Elections Are Vulnerable
Several Democratic presidential campaigns targeted by a Russia-based operation on Facebook’s popular Instagram app said they had been unaware of the new foreign disinformation efforts until the tech giant announced them publicly last week, raising alarms that American democracy remains vulnerable to foreign interference even after three years of investigations into the Kremlin’s attack on the 2016 election. Some said they were unnerved by the nature of the recent Instagram posts, which seemed to target battleground states and demonstrated a nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play in the 2020 Democratic primary race.
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A Brief History of Russian Hackers' Evolving False Flags
Deception has always been part of the hacker playbook, Andy Greenberg writes in Wired. “But it’s one thing for intruders to hide their tracks, and another to adopt an invented identity, or even frame another country for a cyberattack. Russia’s hackers have done all of the above, and now have gone one step further. In a series of espionage cases, they hijacked another country’s hacking infrastructure and used it to spy on victims and deliver malware.”
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The Russian “Dark State” and the Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election
How do we understand Russia’s multi-layered interference in the 2016 elections? Elizabeth Wood, an MIT Russia expert and professor of history, analyzes Russia’s motives, noting that in his televised speech on May 29, Robert Mueller left no room for doubt about Russian interference in the 2016 election, when he said: “I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.” Wood says: “These tactics have been researched by excellent scholars, and they are worth considering in the larger context of Russian statecraft. After all, what I would call the Russian ‘dark state’ — i.e., that part of the state that operates abroad for nefarious purposes, including most recently interference in Ukraine, in Western European elections, and in the poisonings and beatings of both Russians and foreign nationals around the world — has been around for a long time; it is not an invention of Russian President Vladimir Putin, though he has certainly expanded its reach.”
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Thwarting Cybersecurity Attacks Depends on Strategic, Third-Party Investments
Companies interested in protecting themselves and their customers from cyber-attacks need to invest in themselves and the vendors that handle their data, according to new research. To mitigate risks, the researchers recommend companies that are typically competitors become allies in strengthening cyber security supply chains.
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More headlines
The long view
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.