Cybersecurity

Former NSA chief wants academia to play larger role in national security

Paul Nakasone is pushing for new initiatives to bolster national security research and workforce recruitment. It begins with a new institute at Vanderbilt University next month.

Trump campaign allegedly hacked, blames Iran for stealing internal communications

Iranian hacking activities are aligning more with legacy Russian cyber operations, a former top CISA official said.

Iran is accelerating US election influence operations, Microsoft research says

One Iran-linked disinformation collective staged covert news websites that focused on politically divisive topics. Another group breached a low-level account in a county-level swing state.

Nearly 200 firms have signed pledge to build more secure software, top cyber official says

The initial tally began at around 70 companies when CISA first headlined the initiative at RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Top US cyber agency hasn’t seen infamous Chinese hackers breach election infrastructure

A pervasive hacking collective being tracked by U.S. intelligence agencies hasn’t been seen breaking into any election infrastructure, but visibility into the group’s activities still isn’t clear, according to CISA Director Jen Easterly.

Proposal for a federal cyber training institute study passes key Senate committee

It’s one among several cybersecurity workforce-focused bills on the Hill this Congress.

Cyberattacks still ravage schools, defying White House efforts launched last year

Thousands of school districts have tapped into resources committed by the private sector to shore up their cyberdefenses.

Senate confirms first-ever Pentagon cyber policy chief

The new position would help the DOD increase its public-facing cyber outreach efforts.

Critical infrastructure group launches effort to aid federal agencies’ cyber defenses

The federal government’s cybersecurity posture has been spotlighted several times since last decade’s OPM breach.

Senate panel advances cyber regulatory harmonization bill

The bill aims to address overlapping cyber laws that CISOs say have caused compliance headaches.

New NSA-powered AI tool would help industry optimize cyberdefense testing

Autonomous Penetration Testing would overhaul manual work needed to check the cyber armor of firms that service the DOD community, said Cyber Command and NSA head Gen. Timothy Haugh.

New tech, personnel will help CISA with coming rush of cyber incident reports

CISA said “an automated mechanism” could help it better process and review a coming deluge of new cyber incident reports but could not be accounted for in its current budget.

NIST may not resolve vulnerability database backlog until early 2025, analysis shows

A new dashboard underscores the severity of the logjam that’s plagued the agency since February.

Summer-only sessions helped blunt CrowdStrike outage impact on US schools

K-12 school districts across the country were impacted in last week’s CrowdStrike-based IT outage, a person familiar says. The effects would have been much worse if school was in session.

FBI, Mandiant designate advanced North Korean hackers stealing US defense secrets

The group — now known as APT45 — has targeted information stored in U.S. government nuclear facilities and research institutions, as well as missile systems, uranium processing and other R&D intel.

Crowdstrike IT outage linked to update using new threat detection system

A routine update intended to enhance clients’ security capabilities clashed with a new cyberthreat classification framework rolled out in February, causing affected systems to crash.

Exclusive

House lawmaker demands answers from AT&T on recent data breach

Rep. Abigail Spanberger wants AT&T’s CEO to open up about the company’s incident response plans and a reported payment to hackers in exchange for deleting the stolen data.