Government

The type of email attacks that helped derail Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid during the 2016 presidential election cycle could be a prelude to the aggressive tactics we may see in 2020—and new data suggests early candidates and their campaigns aren’t ready to defend themselves.

Three years ago, Russian operatives spear phished the email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman during the 2016 US presidential election.

Scammers know that impersonating a trusted government agency is an extremely effective way to trick or scare victims into handing over money, personal data, or sensitive information. In many cases, it’s all too easy for cybercriminals to use the agency’s own domains to send authentic-looking phishing emails to constituents and contractors. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security announced BOD 18-01 requiring all federal agencies to implement DMARC email authentication by October 2018.

Responding to BOD 18-01, agencies rally to complete the fastest sector-wide adoption of DMARC

One year ago, the Department of Homeland Security announced its Binding Operational Directive 18-01, a mandate for all federal executive branch domains to implement stronger security standards. Specifically, BOD 18-01 required the adoption of HTTPS and DMARC, an email authentication standard that prevents domain spoofing.

Today is the deadline set by the Department of Homeland Security for all executive branch agencies to fully adopt Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), the email authentication protocol needed to prevent phishing attacks that hijack or mimic their domains.

Executive branch DMARC adoption hits 81%—but with roughly 90 days to go, most have yet to implement required enforcement policy levels across all .gov domains

With less than three months left to comply with the Department of Homeland Security's Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 18-01 deadline, adoption of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Compliance (DMARC) protocols for email security has soared from 20% to roughly 81%.

The first deadline for the Department of Homeland Security Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 18-01 has passed and 63 percent of federal agencies have deployed DMARC, up from 18% when the directive was announced three months ago. BOD 18-01 was announced by DHS Assistant Secretary of Cybersecurity and Communications Jeanette Manfra on October 14, 2017. The mandate requires federal domains to improve email hygiene and traffic encryption through the adoption of DMARC and STARTTLS.

The Department of Homeland Security binding directive (BOD 18-01) outlines several milestones that agencies must meet in order to show progress and, ultimately, compliance with the directive.

We are delighted to announce that Agari is among the suppliers listed on the UK Government’s G-Cloud 9 framework.

In this series of blog posts we examine the most common forms of phishing attacks and appropriate countermeasures to protect both individuals and organizations – in this post we explore hacktivism and the growing range of victims.

Politically Motivated & Hacktivism

The threat of cyber criminals pursuing a political agenda and seeking to disrupt critical infrastructures has been well documented. However, hacktivists are now increasingly relying on high volumes of email communication to provide a new window of opportunity for attack.

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