Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

The Trump administration has moved to give the military more latitude to conduct offensive cyber operations against American adversaries, continuing an effort begun in 2017 to grant commanders more leeway to make battlefield decisions. President Donald Trump on Aug 15 signed an order delegating authority to the defense secretary to use cyber tools and techniques to disrupt or degrade an adversary’s network or choke off attacks underway, loosening rules established under the Obama administration.

Four Democratic representatives are pressing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai for answers about the FCC's misidentification of a flood of network neutrality comments as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, specifically when he and others at the FCC found out about the inaccurate diagnosis. The Reps suggested that there were only two options: that Chairman Pai already knew it was not a DDoS attack but had not shared that information, or that he was ignorant of it, which they suggested would be "dereliction of duty."

The way you press, scroll and type on a phone screen or keyboard can be as unique as your fingerprints or facial features. To fight fraud, a growing number of banks and merchants are tracking visitors’ physical movements as they use websites and apps. Some use the technology only to weed out automated attacks and suspicious transactions, but others are going significantly further, amassing tens of millions of profiles that can identify customers by how they touch, hold and tap their devices. The data collection is invisible to those being watched.

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.