Cyber

“Hybrid warfare is already here and America is not ready," says Nebraska senator.

Republican Russia hawks, including Florida senator Marco Rubio, suffered from the Kremlin's early attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election, an expert told lawmakers Thursday.

Editor at large Bill Kristol warned Trump supporters against justifying President-elect Donald Trump's doubts about intelligence assessments affirming Kremlin attempts to sway the results of the 2016 election. Trump has reaffirmed those doubts in recent days by siding with WikiLeaks founder Julian…

Russian vilification of President Obama is reaching renewed heights after the president on Thursday ordered a sweeping package of sanctions and the expulsion of 35 Russian officials from the United States, amid mounting allegations of Kremlin-led efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is joining bipartisan calls for a congressional investigation into Russia's interference in the U.S. election, following an announcement that President Obama has ordered a similar such review.

In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student at Cornell University, decided to write a computer program to measure the size of the still-nascent Internet. Morris’s effort, a cleverly written bit of code that exploited security weaknesses, quickly spread through the computer network,…

The Atlantic dubbed July 8, 2015 “the day the computers betrayed us” as systems supporting the NYSE, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal all suffered crashes. Those events served as a fitting backdrop to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson's remarks on cybersecurity at…

The Atlantic dubbed July 8, 2015 “the day the computers betrayed us” as systems supporting the NYSE, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal all suffered crashes. Those events served as a fitting backdrop to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson's remarks on cybersecurity at…

President Obama met with China’s Special Representatives to the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and Consultation on People-to-People Exchange earlier today, according to the White House. A topic of discussion? America's cyber concerns.

In a speech today in South Korea, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Internet "needs rules to be able to flourish and work properly." This, according to Kerry, is necessary even for "a technology founded on freedom."

State Department deputy secretary Heather Higginbottom testified on Capitol Hill today that the State Department is routinely cyber-attacked. “We are attacked every day, thousands of times a day,” Higginbottom said in response to questioning from Georgia senator David Perdue.

The inspector general of the State Department confirmed today in Senate testimony that the State Department network at some point was hacked. He made the comments in response to a question from Georgia senator David Perdue.

In an email sent out this morning to customers, Anthem president and CEO Joseph Swedish addresses the cyberattack on the insurance company he runs. Swedish also reveals that his information was hacked too, not just the information of millions of customers. 

The Pentagon called the hacking of the Central Command's (CENTCOM) YouTube and Twitter accounts Monday "cyber vandalism" in a letter to service members and their families to allay concerns about the incident. General Lloyd Austin said that the FBI is investigating the "alleged breach" of the two…

The White House spokesman announced the sanctioning of North Korea for the "destructive and coercive cyber attack on Sony."

President Obama said the hacking of Sony was an act of "cyber vandalism," and not an "act of war." He made the comments in an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley, according to a transcript provided by the network.

December 17 was already an important milestone for the North Korean regime: It’s the day the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il, died in 2011, opening the way for his son Kim Jong-un to succeed him as absolute dictator. That anniversary was marked Wednesday with commemorations to signal the end of a…

The full FBI statement on the Sony hacking:

In October 1940, Americans flocked to movie theaters to see Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, mocking the most powerful tyrant on the globe. In December 2014, movie theaters and then the production company cancelled the release of The Interview because of threats of terror from a tinpot, though…

The Washington Post reports:

FBI director James Comey talked about Chinese hacking -- and how basically every American company has been targeted -- last night on 60 Minutes. Comey said that it's not the Chinese are so good, it's that they're "prolific." He likened their hacking style to a "drunk burglar." 

In July, a hacker gained access to a computer server used to test code for the federal government's Obamacare website HealthCare.gov, according to a Thursday report by the Wall Street Journal's Danny Yadron. Although the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stressed no data was taken and…

What to do about cyber attacks from state actors and their surrogates?  For the State Department and DHS it would seem that the answer is now the courts and international negotiation. Hints of this came recently with the indictment of 5 Chinese military personnel for hacking. An utterly futile…

The threat to the U.S. government and U.S. businesses from foreign hackers, especially from China, has been increasingly in the news in recent months. In a little noticed WTOP interview last week, recently installed National Counterintelligence Executive William Evanina expressed the threat in…

Agence France-Presse State Department correspondent Jo Biddle is claiming on Twitter that members of the media traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry to China "have had their bank accounts hacked."

Millions of individuals who recently entrusted personal, medical, and financial information to the federal government while enrolling in Obamacare via Healthcare.gov may find a recent trend reported by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) rather unsettling.  The number of security breaches…

Less than a month after the exposure of a widespread vulnerability on government "open data" websites, another perhaps even more insidious opening for abuse of government websites has come to light. The problem is known as an "unvalidated redirect," and has been found on the websites of the…

The Associated Press reports:

At first glance, a page on the Health and Human Services (HHS) website seems to be giving that agency's official advice on the "The Health Benefits of Nootropics," a classification of purportedly memory-enhancing drugs.  The page is found on the website's subdomain of the Assistant Secretary for…

The website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was repeatedly hacked on Monday and Tuesday this week by an online drug retailer. A Tuesday Google search of the site, www.globalchange.gov, revealed dozens of pages hawking everything from Xanax to Levitra to Ambien. A partial list is…

According to a cyber security expert, security for the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov, is "much worse off" now than before:

A portion of the website of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) was apparently hacked as long as two months ago.  SAMHSA is an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS also runs the new Obamacare insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov.  

Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, is making the case that some "cyber" jobs need to be moved away from the Washington, D.C. area -- and to Louisiana, where those people might be physically safer.

Chinese president Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama doffed their ties, rolled up their sleeves (well, at least Obama did), and even took the now-obligatory stroll around the Sunnylands Estate in Rancho Mirage, California, in the manner of Eisenhower and Khrushchev at Camp David, and Reagan…

Over the past few weeks things cyber have blown up in our faces once again. While some of the media noticed, the gist of the reporting was on who was doing what to us now, not the growing scandal of our essentially supine reaction to it.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had some words about the cyber threat from China while speaking today in Singapore. But a Chinese general, in the room for the speech, immediately responded by saying, "China is not convinced."

On May 6, the media was full of warnings about an immediately pending cyberattack called “OpUSA.” Homeland Security said “The attacks will likely result in limited disruptions and mostly consistent of nuisance-level attacks against publicly accessible web pages and possibly data exploitation.” This…

Since the hacking of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, etc., and the Mandiant revelations about China’s PLA Unit 61398, the media and Internet have exploded with talk of our reaching a “tipping point” in cybersecurity (or not, depending on the point of view). We’re,…

At tonight's State of the Union Address, President Obama will announce that he has signed a cyber security executive order.

Last April, the Iranian Oil Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company noticed a problem with some of their computers: A small number of machines were spontaneously erasing themselves. Spooked by the recent Stuxnet attack, which had wrecked centrifuges in their nuclear labs, the Iranians…

Elliott Abrams is rightly and eloquently outraged about this morning's New York Times article, which features Obama administration officials discussing sensitive and classified national security matters, for the sake of making the president look tough. The leakers—none of whom "would allow their…

From the Washington Post: "Asked Thursday whether he could envision a situation in which the United States would take military action in Syria without U.N. authorization, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said, 'No, I cannot envision that because, look, as secretary of defense, my greatest…

Noah Shachtman reports for Wired that "A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones."

In the Washington Post yesterday, Jackson Diehl had a column on the failure of the State Department to provide funding to something called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a collection of providers of gizmos that can circumvent firewalls constructed on the Internet by repressive…

If it’s still unclear exactly what the Stuxnet worm was meant to target, it’s possible that we won’t entirely understand the consequences of this now notorious malware attack for many years to come. Maybe it will turn out that Stuxnet was little more than the over-hyped tech version of the recent…

Congress's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade held a hearing yesterday to discuss the U.S. strategy, or lack thereof, for dealing with the proliferation of jihadist web sites. In addition to dozens of sites that are explicitly dedicated to spreading jihadist ideology, al Qaeda…