Cyberpion raises $8.25M in seed funding to help businesses secure assets beyond their firewall – TechCrunch
Cyberpion raises $ 8.25M in seed funding to help businesses secure assets beyond their firewall TechCrunch
“HTTPS hijacking” – read more
Tag Archive for: Funding
Election Security Has Become A Partisan Issue As Senate Votes Down Funding
It shouldn’t matter which party you belong to (or if you belong to no party at all): fixing our totally broken election security should be a priority. This is a topic we’ve written about on Techdirt for nearly 20 years. The broken system of electronic voting has always been a security disaster, and now with more direct attempts to influence elections happening, it should be even more of a priority. And yet, following the lead in the House, this week the Senate voted down an amendment from Senator Patrick Leahy providing more funding for election security.
The vote was almost exactly along partisan lines, with only one crossover (Senator Bob Corker was the only Republican who voted for the amendment). While there were some arguments made against the bill, they don’t make much sense:
Sen. Blunt said that states are responsible for running their elections, not the federal government, and that providing more funds would give the impression of federal overreach.
Sen. Lankford said on the floor Wednesday, referencing the omnibus funds, “the $ 380 million amount is what was needed for the moment,” and indicated he didn’t want to fund states beyond that right now.
There can be reasonable questions in how this money is being spent, and what’s being done to actually secure elections, but the fact that this seems to be becoming a partisan issue should worry us all. And, I know some of you will be tempted to do this, but claiming that Republicans are against this because insecure technology helps them get elected is not a serious response. That’s not only cynical, but almost certainly incorrect.
However, at a time when Congress (including many of the Senators who voted against this) have been grandstanding about tech companies being used to influence elections, the fact that they would then not really care that much about our woefully undersecured voting infrastructure just seems ridiculous. For years, we’ve argued that when tech policy issues get partisan, they get stupid, and it would be a real shame for election security, of all topics, to become stupidly partisan.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Techdirt.
Armed Forces denied extra funding as cash diverted to cyber warfare by adviser ‘determined to screw over MoD’
|
SEC hack came as internal security team begged for funding
Somebody didn’t hear that whistle blowing. (credit: Securities and Exchange Commission Office of the Whistleblower)
Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed a 2016 breach of a test system that allowed an unknown party to get access to unpublished corporate information in the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system. The breach potentially allowed the bad actors to profit from trades based on the information. SEC Chairman Jay Clayton revealed the extent of that breach in a policy statement on the importance of the commission’s cyber-security mission. But just a few months before the SEC discovered the initial breach last year, as Reuters reports, members of the SEC’s own internal digital forensics and security team wrote a letter bemoaning the lack of support they received from the agency’s Office of Information Technology and SEC leadership.
In a memo sent to the SEC’s inspector general, the head of the SEC’s Digital Forensics and Investigations Unit complained that his team was woefully underfunded, undertrained, and forced to work with repurposed equipment and hard drives that had been designated by other branches of the SEC for disposal. The memo to SEC Inspector General Carl Hoecker, shared with Reuters by a congressional staffer, cited “serious deficiencies” in funding and support. The entire hardware budget for the unit was $ 100,000 for fiscal year 2017—half a million under the amount needed.
Normally, complaints to the inspector general of an agency get significant attention. However, in this case, the complaint was directed to Hoeker because he oversaw the unit. The Digital Forensics and Investigation Unit was created by Hoeker in 2015 not just for internal security investigations but so his office could play a role in the SEC’s law enforcement role—providing forensic support to SEC criminal investigations. In a 2016 report to Congress, Hoeker described the role of the unit within the SEC Office of Investigations:
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments