Free Republic

The Central Intelligence Agency apparently didn’t trust its partners in the American intelligence and created a fake software update to steal their data. Part of an internal project called ExpressLane, the bogus update was installed by the CIA Office of Technical Service (OTS) agents purported to be upgrading the biometric collection system.This biometric system was installed at the “liaison services” that included National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence. The agency reportedly installed these at partner offices around the world to gain biometric data that was collected by the other agencies. The scathing revelation...

An official timeline of the Office of Personnel Management breach obtained by FCW pinpoints the hackers' calibrated extraction of data and the government's step-by-step response. It illuminates a sequence of events that lawmakers have struggled to pin down in public hearings with Obama administration officials. The timeline makes clear that the heist of data on 22 million current and former federal employees was one sustained assault rather than two separate intrusions to steal background investigation data and personnel records. The document, which bears the seals of OPM and the Department of Homeland Security, is dated July 14 and was prepared...

Hackers have breached a database containing a wealth of sensitive information from federal employees’ security background checks, the Obama administration said Friday — news that experts say could deal a devastating blow to U.S. intelligence gathering. The revelations came just a week after officials disclosed a previous massive cyber intrusion into the same federal personnel office, compromising records of more than 4 million current and past employees in a breach that administration officials have privately blamed on Chinese hackers. The stolen records in the hack disclosed Friday included data on intelligence and military personnel, The Associated Press reported. A senior...

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for...