Election security efforts kicked into high gear after the 2016 election — fueled by Russian interference in that year’s presidential contest. Then 2020 happened. The baseless claims of hacking and fraud that former president Donald Trump and his allies spread after his 2020 loss have polluted conversations about election security ever since, making it far harder to talk about legitimate dangers to the voting process. Trump allies have routinely misrepresented legitimate security concerns to serve their own ends. They’ve also co-opted the language of election security to promote wild conspiracy theories and degrade public faith in the democratic process. They’ve claimed to have found digital vulnerabilities and back doors in voting machines that make no sense to experts who’ve studied those machines. They’ve conducted vote audits that violate all audit protocols and render election machines too insecure to be used again. The result: Talking about genuine election security concerns has become a tortuous process as experts try — usually in vain — to ensure nothing they say will be mischaracterized.
National: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations | Suzanne Smalley/CyberScoop
U.S. Cyber Command wants more tech companies and others on the front lines of the global fight to secure the internet to share more cybersecurity intelligence so that the organization can improve its defensive capabilities, Cyber Command Executive Director Dave Frederick said in an interview Monday. Frederick said Cyber Command regularly shares information it gleans during so-called “hunt forward” operations, defensive cyber missions carried out alongside partners, but needs more private companies to fully report cyber incidents so that Cyber Command can learn from them. Frederick, who was speaking during an industry webinar organized by Billington CyberSecurity, said the 27 hunt forward operations Cyber Command has conducted in the past two years have empowered partner countries to “immediately strengthen the defenses of their networks” and have given Cyber Command “unique insights into adversary malware which we then bring home.” Those insights inform not only Department of Defense cyber defense strategy, but also are shared with the private sector, he said. “We’re able to share the indicators of compromise, new samples of malware that we discover from hunt forward, with the broader cybersecurity community, and they’re able to then build signatures to detect that malware and basically disrupt adversary operations targeting the U.S. civil sector,” Frederick said. “It’s almost like giving an antidote to a virus, so it’s really turned out to be a great model.”
Full Article: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations