The winner of the 2024 US presidential election will confront complicated questions about whether the government is doing enough to protect the country from cyber threats. But one leading conservative group is sidestepping those questions and pushing to shrink the government’s main cyber agency, calling it a bastion of far-left …
Read More »A Senate Bill Would Radically Improve Voting Machine Security
Congress is moving closer to putting US election technology under a stricter cybersecurity microscope. Embedded inside this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act, which funds intelligence agencies like the CIA, is the Strengthening Election Cybersecurity to Uphold Respect for Elections through Independent Testing (SECURE IT) Act, which would require penetration testing of …
Read More »The US Supreme Court Kneecapped US Cyber Strategy
To protect America’s vital infrastructure from hackers without relying on a moribund Congress, the Biden administration bet big on creative uses of existing laws. But the Supreme Court probably blew up that approach. President Joe Biden’s strategy relied on agencies interpreting the laws that give them regulatory powers to include …
Read More »The Tech Crash Course That Trains US Diplomats to Spot Threats
In a sunlight-filled classroom at the US State Department’s diplomacy school in late February, America’s cyber ambassador fielded urgent questions from US diplomats who were spending the week learning about the dizzying technological forces shaping their missions. “This portfolio is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most consequential …
Read More »US Bans Kaspersky Software
The Russian cybersecurity software firm Kaspersky’s days of operating in the United States are now officially numbered. The Biden administration on Thursday said it’s banning the company from selling its products to new US-based customers starting on July 20, with the company only allowed to provide software updates to existing …
Read More »The US Government Is Asking Big Tech to Promise Better Cybersecurity
The Biden administration is asking the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to tightening the digital security of their software and cloud services. The voluntary pledge, first reported by WIRED, represents the latest effort by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to build support …
Read More »The White House Reveals New Master Plan to Stop Everything From Cyberattacks to Terrorism
The Biden administration is updating the US government’s blueprint for protecting the country’s most important infrastructure from hackers, terrorists, and natural disasters. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum overhauling a 2013 directive that lays out how agencies work together, with private companies, and with state and …
Read More »Change Healthcare’s New Ransomware Nightmare Goes From Bad to Worse
Change Healthcare is facing a new cybersecurity nightmare after a ransomware group began selling what it claims is Americans’ sensitive medical and financial records stolen from the health care giant. “For most US individuals out there doubting us, we probably have your personal data,” the RansomHub gang said in an …
Read More »The US Government Has a Microsoft Problem
When Microsoft revealed in January that foreign government hackers had once again breached its systems, the news prompted another round of recriminations about the security posture of the world’s largest tech company. Despite the angst among policymakers, security experts, and competitors, Microsoft faced no consequences for its latest embarrassing failure. …
Read More »How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security
The meeting between top US election officials and their cybersecurity partners from the federal government almost went off without a hitch. Then Mac Warner spoke up. Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, didn’t have a mundane logistical question for the government representatives, who were speaking at the winter meeting …
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