The Department of Homeland Security did not engage in an extended cyber attack against the nation of Georgia, the DHS inspector general has decided.
“We have currently completed our investigation into those allegations and have determined that the interest Georgia referred to on its PC networks turned into the result of everyday and automated laptop message exchanges generated using the Microsoft packages involved,” Inspector General John Roth wrote in a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Monday.
In December, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp dispatched a letter to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, accusing the DHS of 10 cyber attacks of varying sizes around the time of the 2016 presidential election, implying that the alleged assaults were related to the country turning down DHS assistance to secure election systems.
“On November 15, 2016, an IP address related to the Department of Homeland Security made an unsuccessful try to penetrate the Georgia Secretary of State’s firewall. I am writing you to ask whether or not DHS was aware of this strike and, if so, why DHS was trying to breach our firewall,” he wrote.
READ MORE :
- Virgin Media in wifi hacking warning – is your network in danger?
- Russia’s Putin, Saudi Prince Praise Dialogue on Oil, Syria
- A Canadian MP gives a speech in the Mohawk language in a parliamentary first
- WordPress 4.8 arrives with link barriers and widget upgrades
- E-COMMERCE: THE IMPORTANCE OF A GREAT WEB DESIGN
The DHS said internal research into the reported incident confirmed that the “try to penetrate the Georgia Secretary of State’s firewall” became residual traffic from a Federal Law Enforcement Training Center worker checking the Georgia firearms license database. That worker said he changed into doing due diligence on non-public security contractors for the power.
That traffic became caused by the worker cutting and pasting facts from the database to Microsoft Excel, which sent light site visitors to the Georgia server even as they parsed the information. That site visitors would have been in no manner extraordinary.
The DHS inspector general, which operates independently from the DHS chain of command, carried out the 2nd investigation. It established the first record’s outcomes, finding that other states that made comparable claims following the Georgia accusation were also regarded as having drawn nonmalicious traffic.
Roth stated in his letter that the DHS net addresses that contacted the Georgia systems could not be used to assault those systems in the way Kemp defined.
“DHS’s internet proxies are configured to make sure its customers have access to the internet in accordance with DHS’s perfect-use guidelines, and would not allow users to conduct port scanning or similar attacks against Georgia’s infrastructure. In different phrases, it truly might no longer have been possible for the DHS customers to attack Georgia’s systems from those DHS IP addresses,” he wrote.
ARRL Field Day is upon us! For the ones logging with the famous N3FJP Amateur Radio Software, developer Scott Davis, N3FJP, has posted an 11-minute Quick Start video that should be sufficient to get you going. If you’re nonetheless in the dark, approximately a way to use the logging software program that your club or institution will appoint this weekend, those videos may also assist.
If your group is using N1MM Logger+, then check out the 26-minute video by Doug Reece, AK4AO, of his Vienna Wireless Society presentation, wherein he focuses on the use of this free contest software, particularly for a Field Day Operation. The Vienna Wireless Society has also published an instructive PDF prepared via AK4AO.
