Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

President Donald Trump’s reported refusal to give up his personal iPhone demonstrates the complications of keeping government officials secure at a time when they are increasingly tied to their phones by the time they take office.

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. 

When President Donald Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe, or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history. The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed Oct 22 in a 2-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries that occurred in 2013 and 2014, but weren’t disclosed until 2016.

The House Commerce Committee released a white paper detailing the committee’s investigation and recommendations regarding coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) cybersecurity practices. The committee offers two main recommendations to support public and private sector organizations in their adoption of CVD programs as part of their cybersecurity risk management strategies.

The United States Cyber Command is targeting individual Russian operatives to try to deter them from spreading disinformation to interfere in elections, telling them that American operatives have identified them and are tracking their work, according to officials briefed on the operation. The campaign, which includes missions undertaken in recent days, is the first known overseas cyberoperation to protect American elections, including the Nov midterms.

For two years, Alex Stamos was the Facebook executive tasked with defending the company’s systems against Russian interference and other critical threats. Now the former chief security officer, who left the social network in Aug, says Facebook — and the entire technology industry — needs a systems of checks and balances to help it weigh the complex decisions Silicon Valley companies are making in areas including security and democratic expression.

Days after revelations of sweeping security vulnerabilities at Facebook and Google, former CIA director John Brennan offered no confidence that we’ve discovered all of yesterday’s bad news about social-network security and can move on to preventing tomorrow’s. “I don’t think we’ve turned a corner yet, from the standpoint of remediation or prevention,” he said.

West Virginia is about to take a leap of faith in voting technology — but it could put people's ballots at risk. In Nov, it will become the first state to deploy a smartphone app in a general election, allowing hundreds of overseas residents and members of the military stationed abroad to cast their ballots remotely. And the app will rely on blockchain, the same buzzy technology that underpins bitcoin, in yet another Election Day first.