United States set to announce its retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking

  29 Dec 2016 , 11:27

The Obama administration plans to announce on Thursday a series of retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking into U.S. political institutions and individuals and leaking information in an effort to help President-elect Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, two U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

Both officials declined to specify what actions President Barack Obama has approved, but said targeted economic sanctions, indictments, leaking information to embarrass Russian officials or oligarchs, and restrictions on Russian diplomats in the United States are among steps that have been discussed.

One decision that has been made, they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, is to avoid any moves that exceed the Russian election hacking and risk an escalating cyber conflict that could spiral out of control. One example of an excessive step might be interfering with Russian internet messaging.

 The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency and Office of Director of National Intelligence agree that Russia was behind hacks into Democratic Party organizations and operatives ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. There is also agreement, according to U.S. officials, that Russia sought to intervene in the election to help Trump, a Republican, defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Russia has repeatedly denied hacking accusations. Trump has dismissed the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community. Obama, in an interview earlier this month with NPR, said, “We need to take action and we will” against Russia for interfering in the U.S. election. Trump seemed to suggest the United States should not impose sanctions on Russia.

“I think we ought to get on with our lives,” Trump told reporters in Florida on Wednesday when asked about remarks by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who said Russia and President Vladimir Putin should expect tough sanctions for the cyber attacks. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, promised retaliation on Wednesday against Washington in the event of new economic sanctions.

Jim Lewis, a cyber security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said further sanctions may be an effective U.S. tool in part because they would be difficult for Trump to roll back and because Russia “hates” dealing with them. “For the rest of the world, it’s like having ‘scumball’ stamped on your forehead,” Lewis said.

How to respond to the growing problem of cyber attacks carried out or sponsored by foreign powers has bedeviled Obama, whose eight years in office witnessed a torrent of major hacks against the U.S. government and private organizations that were attributed to China, North Korea, Iran and Russia.

In past cases, administration officials have decided to publicly blame North Korea and indict members of China’s military for hacking because they decided the net benefit of public shaming – and increased awareness brought to cyber security – outweighed potential risks.

But determining an appropriate response to Russia’s actions has proven more complicated in part because Russia’s cyber capabilities are more advanced and due to fears about disrupting other geopolitical issues, such as the civil war in Syria. Obama may choose to invoke an April 2015 executive order that empowered him to levy sanctions in response to cyber attacks perpetrated by foreign groups targeting infrastructure, such as transportation, or done for economic purposes.

One option, said a U.S. government official who has participated in discussions on possible retaliation, would be leaking material on Russian officials or actions that the United States already has obtained in a way that would “parallel what the Russians did, but be impossible to prove.”

The official compared that option to Russian military and civilian intelligence agencies providing hacked material to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and trying – unsuccessfully, the official said – to cover their tracks.

Another option would be further economic sanctions against Russia. Washington has already sanctioned Russia over the past two years to punish Moscow for its role in annexing Crimea. But former U.S. officials say the existing measures leave Washington plenty of room to slap new, tougher sanction on Russia in response to cyber intrusions.

The Ukraine sanctions were “narrowly tailored” to hurt specific sectors of Russian industry, such as the energy sector, without causing the nation’s economy to tank, said Juan Zarate, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes.

The United States took a more measured approach, in part, to reserve tougher measures in case the situation worsened, said Zarate, chairman of the Financial Integrity Network, a private consulting firm that advises on financial threats.

The United States is still unlikely to impose blanket embargoes against Russia because of the danger it could harm the economies of Western Europe, said Peter Harrell, a former senior State Department official who worked on sanctions policy. Instead, the United States may target specific Russian intelligence officials or military divisions believed to be involved in the cyber intrusions. “The Russian defense sector would be fair game,” Harrell said.

Looming over any action the Obama administration takes against Russia is whether Trump will seek to reverse course once he takes office on Jan. 20. In addition to casting doubt on the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about the hacks, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and nominated people seen as friendly toward Moscow to senior administration posts.

Reuters

Fake news: Facebook is rolling out new tools to identify and report stories

Image: Which.co.uk

By tech2 News Staff /  16 Dec 2016 , 10:13

Facebook has announced the rollout of new tools that will help the company fight the menace of ‘Fake News.’ This comes right after the company came under fire from US President Barak Obama and governments across the world to accountability for the inaccurate or fake news that is shared on the platform.

Facebook has pointed out that the tools will allow users to quickly report any fake news story using the ‘Report’ feature already present for the posts on Facebook. The company has added a new “It’s a fake news story” in the options and allows the users to mark the story as Fake and message the person who posted the story to notify about the story. Apart from relying on crowdsourcing to report the potential ‘Fake news stories,’ the company has also announced a partnership with third-party fact-checking companies.

Facebook detailed that it is working with five companies about the fact-checking organisations which include ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Snopes and Politifact as reported by The Guardian. All the third-party fact-checking websites are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles.  If a news story is pointed out as inaccurate, the post will include “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers” providing a link to the article refuting the original news article.

One interesting thing to note is that both the features, Third-Party Fact Checkers and Crowd-sourcing to report articles do not work in isolation. The news articles are sent to the face checking websites after the original article has been reported as ‘Fake Story’ by sufficient amount of users. People sharing the disputed articles will get a warning sign informing them about the disputed status of the article.

According to the company, the ‘Disputed’ articles will figure lower on the newsfeed and the publisher or the person who posted the article can not promote the article. The company announced that it had removed the ability to spoof domain names to stop confusion caused by such domains.

How Obama will pass his Twitter account to next president, and what you can learn from it

By Conner Forrest | November 1, 2016, 11:01 AM PST

The White House recently came up with a transition strategy for presidential social media accounts and other properties. Here's what your business can learn.

As President Obama prepares to leave the Oval Office in 2017, part of his transition strategy will include handing over the ownership of social media accounts and certain websites. On Monday, the White House released a blog post detailing that digital transition, and there are a few best practices that enterprises can glean from it.

As noted by the post, Obama is the first president to leverage various social media platforms, securing the handle @POTUS on Twitter, and engaging with online video through Facebook and YouTube as well. These accounts, as well as new platforms like We The People that debuted during Obama's tenure, are just some of the assets that will come under the new president when he or she takes office.

"This digital infrastructure is an asset not just for the next president but

Next US president to get clean social media slate, Obama posts to be archived

  01 Nov 2016 , 09:19

The next president of the United States will start with a huge following on Twitter but a clean slate of tweets. It’s all part of the peaceful transition of power in the social media age. The White House said Monday that Obama’s official @POTUS account will be taken over by the next president. Obama’s tweets will move over to a new handle, @POTUS44, maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration.

Similar changes will take place with Obama’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, along with other Twitter accounts, including Michelle Obama’s @FLOTUS and Joe Biden’s @VP accounts. The White House said it has three goals for the digital transition:

First, all the material published online during Obama’s presidency will be preserved with the National Archives and Records Administration, just as previous administrations have done with handwritten notes, faxes and emails. Second, materials will continue to be accessible on the platforms where they were created, allowing for real-time access. Third, the White House is working to ensure the next president can continue to use and develop the digital assets the Obama administration has created to connect directly with the people they serve.

Obama is leaving office with far more digital content to archive than any previous president. Thousands of hours of video and millions of photos will have to be transferred. Eventually, they’ll be available to download in compact form, such as zip files. The White House also said in a blog post that it’s inviting students, data engineers and others to come up with creative ways to archive the digital content and make it useful and available. The administration said it will make the material available early to people who are interested in building something for the public.

“From Twitter bots and art projects to printed books and query tools, we’re open to it all,” the White House said.

AP

Hillary Clinton vows to respond to foreign hacking against USA

#HACKING

Image Credit: Venture Beat

  29 Sep 2016 , 14:42

Hillary Clinton is vowing anew to respond to foreign hacking the same as any other attack against the United States. When she openly blamed Russia for recent U.S. cyber break-ins, Donald Trump wondered whether to blame overseas governments or overweight hackers working from home. “She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t – maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China,” Trump said during this week’s presidential debate. “It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”

These are the unanswered questions about how the U.S. government should defend itself after an attack in the internet age: Whether to fire back, how to fire back, and at whom? The Obama administration is still writing its rulebook. A lingering challenge involves identifying whose hands were on the keyboard: Foreign hacker spies, cyber criminals, disgruntled insiders or bored teenagers? Skilled hackers can cover their tracks, use software tools traceable to others and feign their location across borders or continents.

On Wednesday, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said during a congressional hearing that it was “now the clear consensus of the intelligence community that the Russian government was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and not, as some suggested, somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

The White House has not officially declared Russia responsible and it’s unclear whether or when it might, since blaming Russia – with whom the U.S. is locked in a bitter dispute over fighting in Syria – would probably require plans for a response.

Clinton has raised eyebrows among some cybersecurity experts with her hawkish language on the campaign trail about retaliating with political, economic or even military means. Her aggressive policy proposal is especially notable since the State Department, which she led during President Barack Obama’s first term, traditionally has a vested interest in avoiding overt conflict since it might complicate diplomatic efforts.

“We’re going to have to make it clear that we don’t want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don’t want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country,” Clinton said during the presidential debate, when asked how she would respond to cyberattacks. For the first time, cybersecurity led the national security portion of the presidential debate, demonstrating its political stakes and the fact that the next president will shape 21st century cyberwarfare policies, setting rules about how the U.S. responds to foreign hackers.

Trump has not released an official position on cybersecurity. Clinton tackles the issue in one-and-a-half pages of her 288-page campaign book. At the debate Trump mentioned “the cyber” without detailing specifics. “We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not,” Trump said. “The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly doable.”

The high-profile discussion came amid a presidential race that has been punctuated by hacks that cybersecurity firms, Democrats and the Clinton campaign have pinned on Russia, as well as multiple security breaches and data leaks. The White House is grappling over how to respond to hacking that some lawmakers have said is attempting to undermine voter confidence in the election.

“We’re in the process now, really the very early stages of developing those norms by virtue of the types of attacks we’re seeing,” said Matt Olsen, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency. Olsen said responding is a challenge: “How do you know who’s responsible for the attack (and) to what extent are the cyber actors even susceptible to the normal responses like economic or diplomatic pressure?”

Clinton’s cyber security stance tracks with work she started while at the State Department. Even back in 2010, she said countries or individuals who hack “should face consequences and international condemnation” and that “an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all.” In the State Department, she created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues to deal with global diplomacy and cyber rules. “There was no other office in the world like mine when it was created five years ago,” said Christopher Painter, who’s served as the office’s coordinator since its inception. “Now we have 25 counterparts around the world and more on the way. That really indicates something that was a huge priority in foreign policy.”

But Clinton is hardly a technology expert herself, once struggling with how to operate a fax machine or connect a new iPad to Wi-Fi. And her cybersecurity record at the State Department is spotty. The FBI said there was no evidence her private email server in her home’s basement was hacked, but agents concluded that it was possible that hackers broke into her personal email account. At the end of her term as secretary, Clinton left behind an agency with one of the lowest scores in government for its compliance with a federal information security law.

Many of the most noteworthy cyberattacks – and the administration’s policy for dealing with them – occurred after Clinton left the State Department. The Obama administration has in recent years adopted a “name and shame” policy for state-sponsored hackers. It criminally charged five Chinese military officials with stealing secrets from nuclear power and solar companies and Iranian hackers with attacks on financial institutions and a small New York dam. In 2014, the U.S. publicly accused North Korea of hacking Sony Pictures and placed sanctions on the already isolated nation.

Associated Press