The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a list of best practices for securing election systems on May 21. […]

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) is warning users “to remain vigilant for malicious cyber activity seeking to exploit interest in Hurricane Florence.” Alongside these recommendations, the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) released a cyber intel advisory on Sept. 14, which notes an uptick in internet activity related to Florence. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

Lawmakers last Wednesday decried a surreptitious industry effort to correct longstanding hardware vulnerabilities affecting nearly all modern computer processors. The reason? The Federal government didn’t get the memo. […]

The latest edition of the Army’s annual Cyber X-Games exercise is designed to let Reserve and other cyber warriors team up to train in dealing with real-world situations. It is focused on protecting U.S. infrastructure, an area somewhat outside the norm for the exercises, but one that reflects an emerging potential battleground on the cyber landscape. […]

Government employees are playing Russian roulette every time they open their inbox. […]

Bot-driven cyberattacks and other fast-spreading malware have been making some pretty big waves of late. The Mirai botnet, for example, launched several record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service–DDoS–attacks starting in September 2016. […]

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) rare public alert last week about a large-scale Russian cyber campaign targeting U.S. infrastructure raised a piercing alarm about vulnerabilities in the nation’s power grid, and underscored what officials have meant when talking about the need for a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach to cyber defense. Protecting against a major attack, managing the damage once one hits, and responding to an attack are beyond the reach of any one agency or sector, they argue; the job requires concerted efforts from the public and private sectors. […]

The computing world has mobilized en masse in response to the revelation of Meltdown and Spectre, vulnerabilities in computer processors that could open most of the world’s PCs and mobile devices to “side-channel attacks” that could steal data. […]

Federal IT executives must move quickly to apply patches for the recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, but should also be on the lookout for potential performance hits and unforeseen glitches associated with the bug fixes. […]

The US-CERT cybersecurity incident notification guidelines that go into effect April 1, 2017, will affect all Federal departments and agencies, as well as state, local, tribal, and territorial government entities, among others. […]