Protesters gather around the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo: Tyler Merbler via Wikipedia/CC)
President Donald J. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on Wednesday on a charge of inciting an insurrection, one week after a riot at the U.S. Capitol led to the deaths of five people.
Many experts don’t believe the impeachment will have a direct impact on cybersecurity. But they warn that the ongoing turmoil surrounding the White House could create fresh opportunities for adversaries seeking to exploit chaos for their own ends.
The House voted 232-197 in favor of impeachment. Ten Republican lawmakers and all Democratic House members supported impeachment. It’s the second time Trump has been impeached during his term, and the first time a president has ever been impeached twice.
President Donald Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives on a charge of inciting an insurrection after a riot at the U.S. Capitol led to the deaths
Protesters gather outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo: TapTheForwardAssist via Wikipedia/CC)
A security researcher based in Vienna led a fast-paced, crowdsourced effort to archive posts, videos and images from the social network Parler after rioters on Wednesday violently stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Parler, launched in 2018, was modeled on Twitter but with a self-proclaimed focus on free speech. It has been adopted by American conservatives as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms, says threat intelligence firm Recorded Future. Following the November 2020 U.S. election, millions of users registered for accounts on Parler.
The Vienna-based researcher and other researchers say that they found a way to forcibly archive Parler content to retain communications that may have touched on the planning and execution of the Wednesday riot.
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Former CISA Director Christopher Krebs at the RSA 2020 conference in San Francisco. (Photo: Mathew J. Schwartz/ISMG)
Embattled software firm SolarWinds is following an increasingly common move for organizations that suffer a serious security failure or data breach: Call in experienced, high-profile crisis experts to advise and help rebuild.
Texas-based SolarWinds has hired Chris Krebs - the former U.S. government cybersecurity czar who was fired by President Donald Trump after he stated that the 2020 election was the most secure in history - to serve as an independent consultant.
As the Financial Times first reported, Krebs now says that he and new business partner Alex Stamos, the former CSO of Facebook, will help SolarWinds with its crisis response.
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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has released an emergency directive requiring all federal organizations still running vulnerable SolarWinds Orion software to immediately update to the latest version.
In an update released Wednesday, CISA says the organizations with a vulnerable version of the SolarWinds platform installed must update to version 2020.2.1HF2 by Dec. 31. The National Security Agency has examined this version and verified that it eliminates the previously identified malicious code, CISA says.
The SolarWinds hacking was initially disclosed on Dec. 13 by FireEye, which discovered the supply chain attack. Multiple federal agencies were compromised, including the Commerce and Treasury departments. SolarWinds says that from March through June, it issued Orion software updates that unintentionally included attacker-added backdoors, which FireEye has dubbed Sunburst. The malicious software updates were signed using valid digital sig