Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats will step down and President Trump will appoint Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, to replace him, the president tweeted Sunday. Saying it was time to start a new chapter, Coats wrote in his resignation letter “I have ensured that we have the capabilities necessary to protect against those who…
Russian state-sponsored cyber actors “conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. elections,” the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concludes in the first volume of its report on Russia’s efforts to interference in America’s most recent presidential election. Released yesterday, volume one focuses specifically on…
On the same day that former U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller publicly testified that Russia is actively taking measures to interfere with America’s 2020 elections, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., blocked the passage of three bills designed to boost the security of elections or the federal government. Yesterday, the senator rejected two separate bills (1, 2),…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has penalized Facebook $5 billion as punishment for what it described as deceptive privacy practices, and imposed new restrictions on the social media giant. Facebook likewise announced that it has agreed to the terms of the deal. In conjunction, the Department of Justice officially filed a…
On the eve of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, congressional Democrats pressed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to bring election security legislation to a vote. “Leader McConnell has not brought one election security bill to the floor,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., co-chairman of the Senate Intelligence…
An annual Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit has found more security vulnerabilities at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and has made more security recommendations to solve the problems. Some of the cybersecurity issues included access control vulnerabilities, a lack of encryption, identification and authorization issues, and a lack of contingency planning, GOA Director of Financial…
Hackers reportedly stole 7.5 TB of data from a contractor for the Russian intelligence service FSB, and revealed details on several of its activities or prospective projects, including the collecting of information on users of social media services, Tor and P2P networks. The contractor, SyTech, has worked for FSB’s radio-electronic intelligence unit 71330 since 2009,…
The House Thursday passed the bipartisan Securing Energy Infrastructure Act, which aims to remove vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to access the energy grid. The bill was sponsored by Representatives Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and John Carter (R-Tex.) and mirrors the Senate legislation introduced by Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho). It seeks to…
Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, confirmed that Julian Assange ran an election interference initiative out of the country’s embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder was at first a welcome then an unwanted guest for seven years. “We did notice that he was interfering in the elections and we do not allow that because we…
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange took full advantage of his protected status in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, likely using the diplomatic post where he lived for seven years as a command center to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, surveillance reports from a Spanish security firm allegedly show. The reports, based on surveillance by…
