DHS Tried To Breach Our Firewall, Says Georgia's Secretary of State (cyberscoop.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CyberScoop: Georgia's secretary of state has claimed the Department of Homeland Security tried to breach his office's firewall and has issued a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson asking for an explanation. Brian Kemp issued a letter to Johnson on Thursday after the state's third-party cybersecurity provider detected an IP address from the agency's Southwest D.C. office trying to penetrate the state's firewall. According to the letter, the attempt was unsuccessful. The attempt took place on Nov. 15, a few days after the presidential election. The office of the Georgia Secretary of State is responsible for overseeing the state's elections. "At no time has my office agreed to or permitted DHS to conduct penetration testing or security scans of our network," Kemp wrote in the letter, which was also sent to the state's federal representatives and senators. "Moreover, your department has not contacted my office since this unsuccessful incident to alert us of any security event that would require testing or scanning of our network. This is especially odd and concerning since I serve on the Election Cyber Security Working Group that your office created." "The Department of Homeland Security has received Secretary Kemp's letter," a DHS spokesperson told CyberScoop. "We are looking into the matter. DHS takes the trust of our public and private sector partners seriously, and we will respond to Secretary Kemp directly." Georgia was one of two states that refused cyber-hygiene support and penetration testing from DHS in the leadup to the presidential election. The department had made a significant push for it after hackers spent months exposing the Democratic National Committee's internal communications and data.

Comments

'"We are looking into the matter"

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: We will deny this happened while privately scolding the team we ordered to do this. If you keep pushing us, we will be forced to throw our IT guys under the bus.

Re:'"We are looking into the matter"

[BarbaraHudson]

More like "We won't be scolding our guys because they were following orders. Whose orders? Sorry, you're not cleared for that | We'll look into it and (maybe) let you know what we find | The people doing the penetration attempt thought your state was on the approved list | It was a computer glitch | Russia tried to hack you, not us."

Re:'"We are looking into the matter"

[Xenographic]

I had to read this carefully before I realized that the US state of Georgia was complaining, rather than the country of Georgia.

Re:'"We are looking into the matter"

[BarbaraHudson]

Either you don't know your history, or you're too lazy to use google, so the first item that comes up when asking about us interference in other countries elections:

In the 1958 Japanese election, the United States gave the Liberal-Democratic Party damaging political intelligence on its main rival, the Socialists. The CIA acquired it from paid informants within the Socialist Party. In the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, the United States leaked damaging information on alleged Sandinista corruption and Swiss bank accounts, funneling the information to German newspapers. The Nicaraguan opposition then used these German media reports to great effect.

In other words, the CIA was doing the exact same thing that they accuse Wikileaks of doing. US exceptionalism at work - "the rules don't apply to us."

and

“Isn’t it interesting that her (Clinton's) campaign is now experiencing the same thing that she perpetrated on other countries,” Netherton told The Huffington Post, as she awaited Sanders’ speech Monday night.

“She did this in Haiti, she did this in Honduras, and now it’s coming back on her and she’s all verklempt about it,” Netherton added. “It’s a little bit of her own medicine, but unfortunately I don’t think she’s open minded enough to see that for what it is.”

Indeed, meddling in foreign politics is a great American pastime, and one that Clinton has some familiarity with. For more than 100 years, without any significant break, the U.S. has been doing whatever it can to influence the outcome of elections up to and including assassinating politicians it has found unfriendly.

Assassinating politicians is certainly going to keep them from running in an election.

When Iran elected a nationalist politician, Mohammed Mosaddeq, the U.S. intervened to launch a coup in 1953, which CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt led. Mossadegh’s crime was to nationalize a British oil company, a forerunner to BP, and to spark concerns among the paranoid Dulles brothers that he was leaning toward the Soviet Union. The U.S. installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s monarch, as the head of Iran and his repressive rule led to the Iranian revolution. That uprising, in turn, has given us a brutally repressive regime in Iran, client terrorist groups around the Middle East, savage sectarian violence in Iraq and a nuclear standoff.

Overthrowing a democratically elected politician and getting rid of elections is also interfering in Iran's electoral process.

When the French withdrew from Vietnam in the 1950s, they scheduled an election to be held shortly after. It became increasingly clear that the communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh would win it in a landslide. So the U.S. intervened and installed Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of a new country it recognized as South Vietnam. The national election was canceled, but the U.S. still needed a way to pretend the puppet regime had political support. So it set up an election between Diem, who was widely disliked, and an exiled member of the royal family who was even more hated. Diem won with an absurd tally of 98.2 percent.

Cancelling an election that would have elected someone the US didn't want to win is most certainly interfering in their electoral process.

The election in 2014 didn’t go as the U.S. intended (like the one in 2009, shot through with fraud that gave it to Hamid Karzai). So the U.S. declared it a tie and created a new position not in the Afghan constitution called Chief Executive Officer.

There are plenty of other examples of US interference in other countries.

DHS bot

[magarity]

detected an IP address from the agency's Southwest D.C. office trying to penetrate the state's firewall... "We are looking into the matter"

Probably the DHS servers are all overrun with botnets trying to probe around for more servers to take over.

Re:Oh noes

[spire3661]

"I was just going down the street turning doorknobs to ensure people's houses are locked up safe. Whats the big deal officer?"

Homelasnd "Security" Ha Ha Ha

[frovingslosh]

The Federal Government just does whatever it wants. Damn the laws or the Constitution or anyone's rights. Get used to it.