In response to the recent terror attacks in Paris, the Department of Homeland Security has adopted a series of new security measures to help keep people safe. Some of the new anti-terror measures include increased airport security, extra security around government buildings and more random researches at airports.
The announcement came shortly after US Central Command’s YouTube and Twitter accounts were hacked by a group of hackers claiming to be ISIS. Both social media accounts were filled with pro ISIS messages and couldn’t have come at a worse time: the hacking occurred right after President Obama announced new legislation designed to protect Americans from cyber-crimes.
While ISIS’s involvement has yet to be officially confirmed, cyber privacy expert Mark Rasch said, “It could have been anybody. It doesn’t really matter that much if it was ISIS. It does matter that a group calling itself ISIS is taking credit for it. The goal here is to cause fear and over reaction. We need to react appropriately to it but not over react to it. The fact that the Twitter feed for CENTCOM was hacked is not that significant. If the documents themselves were stolen from CENTCOM that is significant.”
After the social media pages were hacked, the US military issued a release stating that the hack didn’t involve a breach of any classified information, even though the hackers posted the names and contact information of several military officers. Officials described the attack as “purely a case of cyber vandalism” and stressed the fact that social media accounts are hosted on non-defense departmental servers, providing an extra level of safety to critical and classified internal networks. President Obama is scheduled to oversee a Counter Terror Security Summit at the White House in February, given the fact that this hack occurred right on the heels of the Sony hack prior to the holidays in December.
Many federal buildings in Chicago and other major cities received a major security upgrade in 2013. This initiative will now be expanded to buildings in other locations across the country as well, since it’s clear that cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly dangerous threat to the nation’s national security. Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, spoke about the need to enhance security measures at several government installations, adding that security measures deployed will vary from one location to the other and would be constantly re-evaluated moving forward to ensure that government agencies stay safer from looming cybersecurity threats.
