Austin joined BlueVoyant after building and leading the Cyber Defense practice at K2 Intelligence. Prior to K2 Intelligence, he served 22 years in the U.S. Government. Austin was the Assistant Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s New York Office Cyber Branch. There, he oversaw all national security and criminal cyber investigations in the agency’s largest cyber branch, and was awarded the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence in a Cyber Investigation. Prior to the FBI, Austin achieved the rank of captain in the U.S. Army.
This is not the classified system that was compromised. This is an externally facing account that is used to share and communicate unclassified information.
One year after the SolarWinds attack, the cyber threat from our foreign adversaries is still as present as ever. If the reported attribution is correct, the SolarWinds attack not only demonstrated that global infrastructure is still incredibly vulnerable to our top adversaries, but we are also so connected and so dependent on the ‘digital’ supply chain that an attack such as this can cause wide-scale damage potential.
A lot of people are asking, ‘Why all of a sudden are all these critical infrastructure companies being attacked?' These groups are all financially motivated, and they’re just looking to target new organizations that they know they’re going to get the biggest payday from.
White House rolls out brass on election security — Fairfax launches election security pilot
The hackers didn’t appear to have gained access to internal databases containing state secrets or classified information, and the affected server has been taken offline.
Hackers accessed the FBI’s email system and sent spam to 100,000 accounts on Saturday, according to the Spamhaus Project, an email spam watchdog group.