• Election security It’s Official: The Election Was Secure

    Election officials and election security experts have long been clear: voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and the U.S. system has strong checks in place to protect the integrity of our voting process. “These are the facts,” says the Brennan Center for Justice. “But the facts have not stopped bad actors from trotting out baseless claims of ‘systemic voter fraud’ to suppress votes and undermine trust in our democracy for political gain.” Government officials, judges, and elected leaders, overwhelmingly Republican —and, in the executive branch and the judiciary, mostly Trump appointees — have publicly acknowledged confidence in the November election.

  • The Strategic Implications of SolarWinds

    Recent reports of a broad Russian cyber infiltration across U.S. government networks are a sign of how great-power competition will play out in the twenty-first century. Benjamin Jensen, Brandon Valeriano, and Mark Montgomery write that the SolarWinds operation demonstrates that U.S. Cyber Command’s vision of persistent engagement, which calls for preventively imposing costs as adversaries to shape competition in cyberspace, appears not to have worked as expected. “In the future, what is required is a deeper focus on denial-based approaches: How can the U.S. limit the attack surfaces available to the opposition and harden targets to ensure resilience?” they write.

  • Scope, Damage of Massive Russian Hack Still Uncertain

    Cyberexperts inside and outside the U.S. government are scrambling to determine the dimensions of the massive hack by Russian government hackers of dozens of government agencies and private organizations. “While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy,” said Thomas Bossert, Trump’s former cybersecurity adviser. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), after closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which members were briefed by the intelligence community, said he was “deeply alarmed, and even downright frightened.”

  • U.S. National Security Officials Investigating Hacker Intrusions

    The Trump administration acknowledged Sunday that several U.S. institutions were hacked on behalf of a foreign government. Cybersecurity experts believe Russia is likely behind the attack on the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments in what U.S. media is calling one of the most sophisticated attacks on U.S. government systems in years.

  • Quick Thoughts on the Russia Hack

    David Sanger, building on a Reuters story, reports in the New York Times that some country, probably Russia, “broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems.” The breach appears to be much broader. Jack Goldsmith writes that The U.S. approach to preventing these breaches appears to involve five elements, but that, on the whole, these elements have failed to stop, prevent or deter high-level breaches.

  • Guns, Drones and Poison: The New Age of Assassination

    By Paul Maddrell

    We are living in the greatest-ever age of assassination as states, fearful of the twin threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, are using increasingly sophisticated intelligence to track and kill dangerous people and deprive other states of dangerous knowledge.

  • A Better Kind of Cybersecurity Strategy

    During the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics, held in PyeongChang, South Korea, Russian hackers launched a cyberattack that disrupted television and internet systems at the games. The incident was resolved quickly, but because Russia used North Korean IP addresses for the attack, the source of the disruption was unclear in the event’s immediate aftermath. There is a lesson in that attack, and others like it, at a time when hostilities between countries increasingly occur online. In contrast to conventional national security thinking, such skirmishes call for a new strategic outlook, according to one expert.

  • Russian Government Hackers Exploit Known Vulnerability in Virtual Workspaces

    The National Security Agency (NSA) released a Cybersecurity Advisory on Monday, detailing how Russian state-sponsored actors have been exploiting a vulnerability in VMware products to access protected data on affected systems.

  • Cause of Mystery Illness of U.S. Diplomats in U.S. Embassies in Cuba, China

    Government personnel and their families at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, in late 2016 and the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China, in early 2017 began suffering from a range of unusual — and in some cases suddenly occurring — symptoms such as a perceived loud noise, ear pain, intense head pressure or vibration, dizziness, visual problems, and cognitive difficulties, and many still continue to experience these or other health problems. A new scientific report says that directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases, especially in individuals with the distinct early symptoms.

  • Brain Drain: China’s Campaign of Intellectual Property Theft

    Hundreds of scientists at British universities, who would be banned from almost all postgraduate study in the United States over their ties to military-linked Chinese universities, are currently researching subjects which involve knowledge useful to the creation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. A new reportexplores the number of individuals researching seven subjects considered particularly sensitive by the U.K.’s Academic Technology Approval Scheme.

  • A New White House Spokeswoman, An Old Photo, And A Message About Russian Propaganda

    By Mike Eckel

    Six years ago, Jen Psaki, who was the face of the U.S. State Department, was subjected to constant trolling on the Russian-language Internet, not to mention derision from the state-controlled satellite channel that used to be known as Russia Today. Psaki is to become the White House spokeswoman when Joe Biden is formally inaugurated as president on January 20, 2021. “For anyone who hasn’t been the target of Russian propaganda,” Psaki wrote in a tweet, “the purpose is to discredit powerful messengers and to spread misinformation to confuse the public. Anyone who repeats it is (unwitting or not) simply a puppet of the propaganda machine.”

  • Russian Influence Peddlers Carving Out New Audiences on Fringes

    By Jeff Seldin

    After four years of warnings and preparations, the 2020 presidential election did not see a repeat of 2016, when intelligence officials concluded Russia meddled using a combination of cyberattacks and influence operations. But according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, as well as analysts, the good news ends there.

  • China-Sensitive Topics at US Universities Draw More Online Harassment

    By Lin Yang

    Last week, students at Brandeis University hosted an online discussion about China’s controversial Xinjiang policies, hearing experts discuss the detention, abuse and political indoctrination of more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. But as Uighur attorney and advocate Rayhan Asat appeared before the student group last Friday, her screen was taken over as hackers wrote “fake news” and “liar” on it. Experts said it fits with an increase in more organized harassment against topics on American campuses seen as objectionable by the Chinese government.

  • The China Initiative: Year-in-Review

    On the two-year anniversary of the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, the Department said it continues its focus on the Initiative’s goals, and announced progress during the past year in disrupting and deterring the wide range of national security threats posed by the policies and practices of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government.

  • Surveillance State: Why Zhenhua Data Is Researching Irish People for the Chinese Government

    An obscure Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese intelligence services was found to have collected detailed information on 963 influential Irish people. The Irish dataset is part of the company 2.4 million-strong database, consisting of influential people from practically every country in the world. Intelligence specialists say China’s goal is to identify potential weaknesses that could be exploited to advance China’s interests.