• Cyber Threat Looms Large over German Election

    Whether hacking attacks or disinformation campaigns, online meddling could sway public opinion and influence the outcome of the September vote, experts warn. Recent incidents suggest that the threat is real.

  • Was SolarWinds a Different Type of Cyber Espionage?

    The Biden administration announced that it will impose sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to the SolarWinds incident. The cybersecurity firm FireEye disclosed the compromise of numerous government and private-sector networks in December 2020. SolarWinds is among the top cybersecurity breaches the U.S. government has ever confronted and has raised critical questions about the integrity of federal networks and Russia’s ultimate intentions. “Given the incident’s significance, it is understandable that the Biden administration is grappling with how to appropriately address it,” Erica D. Borghard writes. But setting aside important limitations of economic sanctions as a policy tool to address malign cyber behavior, “there is a gap between how administration officials are framing the nature of the SolarWinds incident and what the available evidence indicates about it,” she adds.

  • A Framework for Secure Cyber-Physical Systems

    Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which combine modern networking with physical actuators, can be vulnerable against hackers. Recently, researchers at DGIST developed a new framework for CPSs that is resilient to a sophisticated kind of cyberattack. Unlike existing solutions, the proposed approach allows for real-time detection and recovery from the attack while ensuring stable operation. This paves the way for secure and reliable CPSs across various application domains, such as smart cities and unmanned public transportation.

  • SolarWinds Hack Bigger, More Dangerous than Previously Thought, Tech Execs Warn

    Executives with technology companies impacted by the massive cybersecurity breach known as the SolarWinds hack are giving U.S. lawmakers more reason to worry, warning the intrusion is both bigger and more dangerous than first realized.

  • Cyber Workforce Protecting U.S. National Security

    The Defense Department’s cyber workforce is tasked with defending virtually every system that the department relies on to protect national security.

  • Biden Orders Review to Bolster Supply Chain Resiliency

    President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday to formally order a 100-day government review of global supply chains and potential U.S. vulnerabilities in key industries including computer chips, electric vehicle batteries, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals used in electronics. On top of the 100-day review of these four key industries, Biden’s order also directs yearlong reviews for six sectors: defense, public health, information technology, transportation, energy and food production.

  • The Infrastructure of Hate: Epik Hosts Extremist Groups

    Social media platforms have received the lion’s share of attention for enabling users to spread hate and disinformation and plan and incite violence and terrorist acts. Flying under the radar are infrastructure providers like Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company that works with nearly 750,000 websites and is ranked among the 50 largest web hosts. While some companies at the infrastructure level have acknowledged a level of responsibility for addressing abuse of their services—for example, this framework by domain registrars signed by leading companies such as GoDaddy, Tucows and Amazon—Epik is not among them.

  • How Shared Partisanship Leads to Social Media Connections

    It is no secret that U.S. politics is polarized. An experiment conducted by MIT researchers now shows just how deeply political partisanship directly influences people’s behavior within online social networks. The Twitter experiment shows clear self-selection into social media “echo chambers” due to political preferences.

  • Facebook Restores News to Australian Users

    Facebook is restoring news content to its users in Australia after resolving a dispute with the government. Last week, Facebook blocked Australians from sharing and reading news stories on its platform in a dispute with the government in Canberra.   

  • Inoculating against the Spread of Radical-Islamist and Islamophobic Disinformation

    Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are core components of radicalization and extremism and apply equally to Islamist radicalization and the generation of Islamophobia. One method of countering disinformation is to inoculate the information consumer.

  • 46,218 News Transcripts Show Ideologically Extreme Politicians Get More Airtime

    We research how changes in the media have shifted the incentives of elected officials and the considerations of voters, and what that means for American democracy. In recent work, we showed that extremely conservative and extremely liberal legislators receive far more airtime on cable and broadcast news than their moderate counterparts. Robust local news outlets once held legislators to account by covering whether they delivered for their districts. But as local news has declined, voters are turning to national media outlets for their political news. There, ideological outliers now set the tone of the debate, distorting perceptions of the important issues and warping Americans’ views of their political options.

  • French Companies Targeted by Russian Cyberattack between 2017 and 2020

    A broad Russian cyberattacks in France was carried out via French software Centreon, which serves large companies and government agencies. The cyberattack resembles Russia’s exploitation of vulnerabilities in SolarWinds to attacks American companies and government agencies. The scope of Russia’s cyberattack in France is still uncertain.

  • Preventing Cybersecurity Disruptions by Training Workforce

    Two cybersecurity researchers have published a new book to help train employees at public utilities to recognize cybersecurity vulnerabilities and develop measures to defend their networks from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

  • Helping Industry Develop Secure Grid Technologies

    Rapid development and deployment of new technologies in the energy delivery systems marketplace make the power grid a hotbed for innovation—and an attractive target for cybercriminals. Cybersecurity researchers are working to change that by building next-generation tools for hardening the power grid—and other critical infrastructure—against attack.

  • Germany: Hate Speech, Threats against Politicians Rise

    Three weeks after a neo-Nazi was convicted of murdering regional governor Walter Lübcke. In answer to a parliamentary information request from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the Interior Ministry reported that 1,534 crimes against politicians, party members or party property had been reported in 2020, a 9 percent increase on the year before.