Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

President Donald Trump has made it official: Government contractors can't buy equipment from Chinese telecoms ZTE or Huawei as part of those contracts, and must submit a plan for phasing out the use of that equipment from its systems. That came with President Trump's signature of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act and after the companies were called out by top US intelligence officials as tied to the Chinese government and thus a national security threat.

Democratic lawmakers weren’t happy with the Federal Communications Commission inspector general concluded that the agency "misrepresented facts and provided misleading responses to Congressional inquiries" regarding an outage of the FCC’s online commenting system.

On May 7, 2017, the Home Box Office (HBO) program “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” aired a segment in which the host John Oliver discussed the Federal Communications Commission’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” (RIF) proceeding and encouraged viewers to visit the Commission’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) and file comments.

The Chinese government certainly has the ability to pursue an online political disinformation campaign directed at foreign elections — but hasn’t yet because it favors long-term thinking over Russia’s scorched-earth foreign policy, experts said. Researchers note that China could turn its sights on the US if it wanted to. “The question for me and some other researchers is: will they make that jump more aggressively to the English language space in the more heavy-handed manipulation sense?

Congress is sending President Donald Trump legislation that would force technology companies to disclose if they allowed countries like China and Russia to examine the inner workings of software sold to the US military. The legislation, part of the Pentagon’s spending bill, was drafted after an investigation found software makers allowed a Russian defense agency to hunt for vulnerabilities in software used by some agencies of the US government, including the Pentagon and intelligence services. Security experts said allowing Russian authorities to probe the internal workings of software, kno

Two years after Russia interfered in the American presidential campaign, the nation has done little to protect itself against a renewed effort to influence voters in the coming congressional midterm elections, according to lawmakers and independent analysts. They say that voting systems are more secure against hackers, thanks to action at the federal and state levels — and that the Russians have not targeted those systems to the degree they did in 2016. But Russian efforts to manipulate U.S.

Facebook has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections. The company detected and removed more than 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference.

In a recent press briefing, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that the grand jury assembled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller had returned an indictment against 12 officers of Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (better known as Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, or GRU).

Sen Ben Sasse (R-NE) says the Trump Administration needs to get serious about cyberdefense. And he’s taking some cues from history with the hope of kicking the administration into action. Tucked in a massive defense policy bill Congress appears poised to pass in the coming weeks is a measure from Sen Sasse that would create a commission of top national security officials, lawmakers and experts to draw up a comprehensive cyberdefense strategy for the country. The proposal is based on the Project Solarium Commission, a Cold War effort President Dwight D.