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Campaign Finance Enforcement Is an Essential Component of National Security
Russia is at it again, so this week’s campaign finance enforcement action – in which two Russian-born associates of Rudy Giuliani have been indicted and arrested for violating campaign finance laws, including allegedly funneling Russian money into the main pro-Trump political action committee (PAC) — could not have come at a more important time for defending American democracy from foreign interference. The 2016 presidential election was subject to “sweeping and systematic” interference, and the next presidential election is just a year away with the FBI warning that “the Russians are absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.”
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Aerial Threat: Why Drone Hacking Could Be Bad News for the Military
Unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly called drones, are now a fundamental part of defense force capability, from intelligence gathering to unmanned engagement in military operations. But what happens if our own technology is turned against us? As with all IT technology, manufacturers and users may leave the digital doors unlocked. This potentially leaves opportunities for cyber-criminals and perhaps even cyber-warfare.
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Using Machine Learning to Hunt Down Cybercriminals
An increasingly popular form of cyber-attack is to hijack IP addresses for a range of goals, from sending spam and malware to stealing Bitcoin. It’s estimated that in 2017 alone, routing incidents such as IP hijacks affected more than 10 percent of all the world’s routing domains. Existing efforts to detect IP hijacks tend to look at specific cases only when they’re already in process. But what if we could predict these incidents in advance by tracing things back to the actual hijackers themselves?
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Senate Intel Committee: Russia Is Already Trying to Influence the 2020 Election
In recent months, President Donald Trump has intensified his efforts to advance the lies spread by the Kremlin and undermine the U.S. intelligence community consensus that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. On July 25, Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to help push a Russian and far-right conspiracy theory that the U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike worked with Ukranians and Democrats to frame Russia for election meddling. Patrick Tucker writes in Defense One that one important contribution of the second report on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, issued by the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is that the committee, chaired by Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), is decisively refuting Trump and his conspiracy theory.
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Iranian Government Hackers Target U.S. Presidential Campaign: Microsoft
Microsoft announced on Friday that a hacking group linked to the Iranian government has carried out a campaign against a U.S. presidential candidate. The group, which the tech giant named Phosphorous, made more than 2,700 attempts during a 30-day period between August and September to identify customer e-mail accounts. The hackers managed to hack into 241 of them. On Thursday, DHS and the FBI circulated a memo to state election officials warning that Russia will likely seek to interfere in the 2020 elections by discouraging voters or utilizing voter suppression tactics.
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New Institute to Lead Government, Industry Effort to Make 5G More Secure
5G wireless technology promises to deliver a technology revolution in wireless communication. Already, wireless carriers and equipment manufacturers are incorporating 5G capabilities in their devices and working to construct national 5G networks. As the 5G revolution moves forward, a national challenge will emerge to develop and validate 5G security protocols and data protection technologies. To respond to this challenge, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has established the INL Wireless Security Institute to lead and coordinate government, academic, and private industry research efforts fostering more secure and reliable 5G wireless technology.
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Democrats Must Act Now to Deter Foreign Interference in the 2020 Election
Parts of the U.S. government, such as the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as state authorities, are working to prevent foreign interference in American elections, “but even with a Herculean effort, the country’s defenses against political warfare, especially in the cyber domain, are weak and porous. Such attacks are easy to execute, but difficult and expensive to thwart. The threat is evolving and will be different than it was in 2016. There are many targets,” Thomas Wright writes. “When defense is difficult, deterrence becomes important. One way to deal with election interference is to convince foreign adversaries that the cost might outweigh the gains, thus persuading them not to attack. This is where Trump’s position is so damaging, seeking to punish interference against him, but openly welcoming interference on his behalf.”
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U.S. Officials Taking Putin Election Comments Seriously
U.S. security officials are not laughing at the latest comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin about the Kremlin’s attempts to interfere in U.S. elections. Putin, speaking at an economic forum in Moscow Wednesday, dismissed U.S. allegations that Russia meddled in both the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the 2018 mid-term election as “ridiculous.” Despite Putin’s comments, U.S. security and intelligence officials have said, consistently, that they have seen indications Russia will try to interfere with the upcoming 2020 presidential elections.
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A Bipartisan Step Toward Securing Our Election Infrastructure
Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $250 million in funds to support state and local government efforts to strengthen election security ahead of the 2020 elections. The Committee’s action is an acknowledgment that securing elections from foreign interference is a bipartisan priority that requires more funding and continuous vigilance.
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A Federal Backstop for Insuring Against Cyberattacks?
The effects of warfare can be felt well beyond the battlefield. Businesses are interrupted, property damaged, lives lost—and those at risk often seek to protect themselves through insurance. The premiums that insurers charge, however, rarely account for the immense destructive capacity of modern militaries, making wartime claims a potentially existential threat to their fiscal solvency. For this reason, insurance policies routinely exclude “acts of war” from their coverage, leaving it to governmental authorities to decide whether to compensate the victims of such acts while focusing the insurance sector on other, more conventional risks. But what happens when the battlefield moves into cyberspace?
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Britain Is “At War Every Day” Due to Constant Cyberattacks, Chief of the Defense Staff says
The Chief of the U.K. Defense Staff has said that Britain is “at war every day” due to constant cyberattacks from Russia and elsewhere. Russia and China’s “interpretation” of the rules governing international engagement threatened “the ethical and legal basis on which we apply the rule of armed conflict,” General Carter said. “Russia is much more of a threat today than it was five years ago.” He added: “There is still clearly going to be human interaction – warfare is essentially a political function - but it will be a much more sophisticated and will include the new domains [alongside land, sea and air] of space and cyber.”
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Trump Told Russian Officials in 2017 He Wasn’t Concerned About Moscow’s Interference in U.S. Election
President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 10 May 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter. “White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him, the three former officials said. Trump also seemed to invite Russia to interfere in other countries’ elections, they said,” the Washington Post reports, quoting a former Trump administration official to say: “’What was difficult to understand was how they got a free pass on a lot of things — election security and so forth,’ this former official said. ‘He was just very accommodating to them.’”
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A New National Security Framework for Foreign Interference
A series of recent signals from Trump administration officials, including the President, are normalizing an idea that is detrimental to our national security – that soliciting foreign interference in a U.S. election won’t be prosecuted. Jessica Brandt and Joshua Rudolph write in Just Security that with foreign rivals from Beijing to Moscow and elsewhere watching closely, it will become open season on our democracy unless we quickly shift our legal framework for such behavior from a campaign-finance perspective to a national security approach. It is now stunningly evident that when it comes to protecting our democracy from foreign interference, our current legal framework is not up to the task,” Brandt and Rudolph write. “That is in part because what we are dealing with are national security threats, not a technical campaign finance violations.”
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Privacy Flaw Found in E-Passports
Researchers have discovered a flaw in the security standard of biometric e-passports that has been used worldwide since 2004. This standard, ICAO 9303, allows e-passport readers at airports to scan the chip inside a passport and identify the holder.
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How Kids Get into Hacking
Is your kid obsessed with video games and hanging out with questionable friends? These are common traits for involvement in cybercrime, among other delinquencies. New research characteristics and gender-specific behaviors in kids that could lead them to become juvenile hackers.
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More headlines
The long view
Ransomware Attacks: Death Threats, Endangered Patients and Millions of Dollars in Damages
By Dino Jahic
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.