Wickedness President Mike Pence described several new initiatives meant to thwart cyberattacks against U.S. elections systems on Tuesday.
The Federal Bureau of Inquiry has formed a foreign influence task force, he said, aimed at investigating well-springs of nation-state backed election influence. DHS has launched the elections information sharing and enquiry center, which includes participation from U.S. secretaries of state with the object of sharing threat information to “help prevent attacks before they befall.”
Pence said the moves would “elevate American security.”
“We will be as ruling in the digital world as we are in the physical world,” he said. He also affirmed verdicts from U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 plebiscite.
“The fact is Russia meddled in our 2016 elections. That’s the unambiguous judgment of our mother wit community, and as the President said, we accept the intelligence community’s conclusion,” he suggested.
To combat cyber threats in the upcoming Congressional election, Pence remarked the administration is also deploying “new sensors” to detect threats, and 37 states experience opted in so far, he said. Federal cybersecurity officials are also being deployed to stately and local elections commissions. He cited a cyberattack in July against administration services in Finney County, Kansas, including elections infrastructure, to which he said DHS moved and helped remediate.
Pence focused several comments on efforts to funding better information exchanges between federal agencies and private sector societies. He referred to numerous types of attacks from countries other than Russia, including heist of intellectual property from China, the criminal intrusion of Equifax abide year and the WannaCry ransomware attacks of 2017 that have been assigned to North Korea.
He also called out particularly damaging effects of pandemic infrastructure attacks, another key focus of the conference:
“[Cyberattacks] also butt our economy — a single Russian malware attack last year expenditure a major American shipping company $400 million,” said Pence, referring to the NotPetya cyberattack of June 2017, that keenly affected the supply chain of shipping giant FedEx.
Pence’s say discusses followed statements by FedEx’s chief information security officer Gene Sun, who contoured the damage suffered by the company in the June attacks last year. FedEx “saw the flutter effect of supply chain damages,” Sun said “Medical supplies could not be dispatched out. We quickly came to a few realizations, number one, that we as a logistics company cannot go it by oneself,” he said.
The conference focused on the launch of a new National Risk Management Center, to staff pool corporate and government cybersecurity information into one location. Facebook also harbingered earlier today that it had worked to take down 32 Instagram and Facebook accounts that were imply of what the company called a “coordinated effort” to influence U.S. politics.