Free Republic

The overwhelming majority of California's state agencies are ill-prepared to defend against cyberattacks, according to the state auditor, putting Social Security numbers, health records, and income tax information at risk for millions of Californians.

A breach of taxpayers' information at the Internal Revenue Service was bigger than initially disclosed, the agency said Monday. Hackers gained access to the information of as many as 220,000 more people than the 104,000 accounts that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in June may have been compromised. The IRS said it is mailing 220,000 letters notifying people that their information may be compromised. It said that it would also offer free credit protection and Identity Protection PINs to the victims. The revelation Monday is the result of an IRS review of an earlier incident in the spring, when hackers...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s mysterious email server has been in a private data center in New Jersey since 2013, that is, until the IT company the former secretary of state hired to maintain the hardware handed the “blank” device over to the FBI Wednesday. Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, informed the Department of State in a letter Wednesday that the company hired to manage and maintain the server, Denver-based Platte River Networks, was turning it over to the Department of Justice. Kendall also told State he handed over three thumb drives that contained Clinton’s emails. The Washington Post reported the...

What is Will Hurd, Republican Congressman from Texas, doing here? “The best way to defend digital networks is to have an attacker’s mentality,” Hurd told Defense One. Hurd, who spent nearly a decade as an undercover CIA operative in places like Afghanistan, doesn’t freak out easily. ... For one thing, he ran a cybersecurity firm for four years. Naturally, he’s made cybersecurity a cornerstone of his legislative efforts.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19, 2010 – New guidelines from U.S. Strategic Command officials allow servicemembers to use “thumb drives” and other flash media to store computer data under specific circumstances. Strategic Command officials banned use of thumb drives and flash media in November 2008, after the use of the media infected a number of Defense Department computer systems. Computers users had to turn to alternative means to transfer data from one machine to another. Now, the command has lifted the ban on the devices under carefully controlled circumstances, said Navy Vice Adm. Carl V. Mauney, Stratcom’s deputy commander. The command issued...

Year after year the American people have been constantly warned of the impending doom that are their Social Security benefits due to fact that there are now more people collecting Social Security than paying into it. While the controversy over the future of Social Security is well known, what has not received much attention is that right now Americans are in danger of having their benefits delayed, and not just their Social Security checks. Veterans who fought for this country, and who are dependent on financial support from the Veterans Administration (VA) to purchase medicine or treatment could also see...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said a controversial new surveillance bill could sweep away “important privacy protections”, a move that bodes ill for the measure’s return to the floor of the Senate this week. The latest in a series of failed attempts to reform cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) grants broad latitude to tech companies, data brokers and anyone with a web-based data collection to mine user information and then share it with “appropriate Federal entities”, which themselves then have permission to share it throughout the government. Minnesota senator Al Franken queried the DHS in...

Here's a quick FYI: if you installed Windows 10, and in a rush to try out Microsoft's new operating system, you clicked through the default settings without looking, you may want to look again. ... There's a handy guide here to the settings you need to look out for during the install and afterwards.

In a recent WIRED article, security researchers Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger tackled just that issue. The wife and husband duo purchased two $13,000 TrackingPoint rifles and spent the last year reverse engineering and hacking the rifles’ computers. The two plan to present their research at the Black Hat hacker conference in two weeks, according to the article. TrackingPoint bills itself as a company comprised of “lifetime NRA members and engineers.” The products sold on its website seem standard enough when it comes to a gun company: bolt-action rifles, semi-automatic carbines, etc. The “5.56mm semi-auto,” basically a M16-type rifle, costs...

Financial companies are facing extortion threats from hackers who threaten to knock their websites offline unless firms pay tens of thousands of dollars, an FBI agent told MarketWatch Thursday. More than 100 companies, including targets from big banks to brokerages in the financial sector, have received distributed denial of service threats since about April, says Richard Jacobs, assistant special agency in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s New York office. With these types of attacks, known as DDoS, criminals jam websites by flooding them with useless traffic. The ransom requests typically run in the tens of thousands of...

One of the things that civil liberties activists like to lament about is that the general public seems to care more about Google and Facebook using their personal data to target advertising than the government using it to target drone strikes. The reality is that both types of abuse are dangerous, and they work hand in hand. It’s hard to find a more perfect example of this collusion than in a bill that’s headed for a vote soon in the U.S. Senate: the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA. CISA is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a...

Cyber warfare has gone nuclear. So says Valerie Plame, the former covert CIA agent who spent her intelligence career working against the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Now she’s taking on a new task: helping government agencies and companies stem the relentless flood of hacker attacks. “There’s a huge impact on national security and intelligence,” says Plame, who this spring became an adviser to cybersecurity startup Global Data Sentinel. “The new normal is going to be more and more of these hacks, whether it’s Target or Home Depot or the Office of Personnel Management or Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photos.”...

The prolonged hacking into the White House Office of Personnel Management, which put the personal information of at least some 21.5 million past and current federal employees in jeopardy, is only the beginning of the security threat to the Obama Administration and its successors, a number of top-level experts in cybersecurity have told Fox News. The attack has been frequently sourced as coming from China. The experts warned that the entire U.S. national security clearance system could be compromised, that future senior government leaders and advisors could be targeted even before taking office, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials...

Over the past three weeks, my family and I spent more than 22 hours driving more than 1,400 miles for our vacation. The trip involved enduring construction traffic, heavy rainstorms and unbelievably frightening, dense and fast traffic along interstates merely two lanes wide. We made it through safely, partly because I pulled over to let my husband drive through the rain (I hate driving in rain) and partly because he has learned to endure my uncontrollable need to provide commentary about his driving skills from the passenger seat -- even though his driving record is better than mine. It defies...

Hackers have stolen and leaked the personal details of users of Ashley Madison – a site that hooks up people who want to have affairs. A group or individual known as The Impact Team claimed to be behind the attack and that it had data on all of Ashley Madison's 37 million users and its partner sites, Cougar Life and Established Men, all owned by Canada's Avid Life Media (ALM). The Impact Team claims to have access to the company's user database and is threatening to release all of the information unless the site is taken down. So far the...

Could a data breach on the scale suffered by the Office of Personnel Management happen to Healthcare.gov?

SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of security technologists has concluded that the American and British governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, is a formidable salvo in a skirmish between intelligence and law enforcement leaders, and technologists and privacy advocates. After Edward J. Snowden’s revelations — with security breaches and awareness of nation-state surveillance at a record high and data moving online at breakneck speeds — encryption has...

On Tuesday, someone broke into an underground vault in Sacramento, and cut several high-capacity internet cables. Nobody knows who this person is or why they did it, but since that time the FBI has revealed that it was not an isolated incident. They’ve been investigating 10 other recent attacks on the internet infrastructure of California, and they seem to be deeply troubled by the vulnerability of these cables. ........................ The article goes on to compare these incidents to similar attacks that happened in Arizona last year, as well as California in 2009. However, they may be missing the bigger picture....

Someone hacked through yet another fiber optic cable in the San Francisco Bay area early Tuesday morning, continuing a rash of incidents that have disrupted Internet traffic and vexed law enforcement officials. The latest attack occurred at around 4.30 am Pacific Time near the town of Livermore, about 50 miles east of San Francisco. Someone climbed down a manhole cover there and cut through several fiber optic cables, according to several reports. The FBI is investigating. The cables are operated by backbone providers such as Level 3 Communications, which sell capacity to other cable and Internet providers. The cables carry...

Nearly a month after news broke of a massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management -- and three weeks after first denying, then admitting, that security clearance information was stolen -- OPM has shut down its electronic background check system. The agency said the move is a proactive step, not a reaction to another hack. In a June 29 alert posted on OPM's website, the agency says, "The [Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing] e-QIP system will be down for an extended period of time for security enhancements." There was no word on how background checks would be handled with...