A DHS data breach exposed PII of over 250,000 people

In other news:

• A group of senators has introduced a bill to secure U.S. elections. The Secure Elections Act is a bipartisan bill that aims to provide federal standards for election security. One measure proposed in the bill is to eliminate the use of paperless voting machines, which are regarded by election security experts as the least secure type of voting machines in use in today. Paperless voting machines don't allow for audits, which the proposed legislation also wants to make a standard practice in all elections. The idea is that audits after every election will deter foreign meddling in American democracy like Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "An attack on our election systems by a foreign power is a hostile act and should be met with appropriate retaliatory actions, including immediate and severe sanctions," the bill states. The bill was sponsored by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and co-sponsors Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
• Attackers exploited a vulnerability in Google Apps Script to automatically download malware onto a victim's system through Google Drive. Discovered by researchers at Proofpoint, the vulnerability in the app development platform enabled social-engineering attacks that tricked victims into clicking on malicious links that triggered the malware downloaded on their computer. The researchers also found the exploit could happen without any user interaction. Google has taken steps to fix the flaw by blocking installable and simple triggers, but the researchers at Proofpoint said there are bigger issues at work. The proof of concept for this exploit "demonstrates the ability of threat actors to use extensible SaaS platforms to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims in even more powerful ways than they have with Microsoft Office macros over the last several years," the research team said in a blog post. "Moreover, the limited number of defensive tools available to organizations and individuals against this type of threat make it likely that threat actors will attempt to abuse and exploit these platforms more often as we become more adept at protecting against macro-based threats." The researchers went on to note that, in order to combat this threat, "organizations will need to apply a combination of SaaS application security, end user education, endpoint security, and email gateway security to stay ahead of the curve of this emerging threat."
• The United States federal government is nearing its deadline to implement the domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC) tool. In October 2016, the DHS announced it would mandate the use of DMARC and HTTPS in all departments and agencies that use .gov domains. DHS gave those departments and agencies a 90-day deadline to implement DMARC and HTTPS, which means the Jan. 15, 2018, deadline is soon approaching. According to security company Agari, as of mid-December, 47% of the federal government domains were now using DMARC, compared to 34% the month before. Another requirement within this mandate is federal agencies are required to use the strongest "reject" setting in DMARC within a year. This means emails that fail authentication tests will be less likely to make it to government inboxes -- i.e., be rejected. Agari reported a 24% increase in the use of higher "reject" settings in the last month. On the flip side, Agari noted that most agency domains (84%) are still unprotected, with no DMARC policy.