Free Republic

North Korea is so isolated that rather than bring the Internet to its hackers, it brings them to it—in a swank hotel in China. The luxury hotel that has been called a command post for North Korean hackers would make for a unique holiday getaway and give you lots to talk about back home. “Surprisingly Great Hotel - Clean, Tasteful.... and North Korean!” says a trip advisor review for the Chilbosan Hotel in Shenyang, China. For just $53, you get “a deluxe twin room,” including a North Korean breakfast considerably more substantial than those enjoyed by the vast majority of...

Annoyed with the U.S. missile strike last week on an airfield in Syria, among other things, hacker group Shadow Brokers resurfaced on Saturday and released what they said was the password to files containing suspected National Security Agency tools they had earlier tried to sell.“Is appearing you are abandoning ‘your base’, ‘the movement’, and the peoples who getting you elected,” the group wrote in broken English in a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump posted online on Saturday.The hacker group, believed by some security experts to have Russian links, released in January an arsenal of tools that appeared designed to...

Kim Jong Un may be behind biggest bank heist in history he man behind the biggest bank heist in history may have been Kim Jong-un. Federal prosecutors are preparing to finger North Korea for orchestrating the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year, according to a report.

Late last week, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed the White House of the likely fall-out from the WikiLeaks cable dump, the White House came back with a question: "What's our corrective action?" Clinton's undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, had a simple suggestion: pull the plug on SIPRNet, the classified DoD network that PFC Bradley Manning reportedly used to download the cables from State's inhouse classified database. "The White House said do it," says a senior administration official. The publication by WikiLeaks of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, many of them classified, is forcing an administration-wide intelligence retrenchment as...

Flashback: First FISA Request on Trump Tower Came After Clinton and AG Lynch Met Privately on Tarmac Was it coincidence or an indication of things to come? The pieces to Obamagate are falling together. On June 27th of 2016, Bill Clinton met secretly with Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. A week later FBI Director James Comey laid out in a press conference the many scandalous activities taken by Hillary Clinton while she was President Obama’s Secretary of State and then he said the famous words: "Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would...

WASHINGTON -- Hillary Rodham Clinton's private email server, which stored some 55,000 pages of emails from her time as secretary of state, was the subject of attempted cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013, according to a congressional document obtained by The Associated Press. While the attempts were apparently blocked by a "threat monitoring" product that Clinton's employees connected to her network in October 2013, there was a period of more than three months from June to October 2013 when that protection had not been installed, according to a letter from Sen....

WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) released the following statement after voting against Rex Tillerson, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State:Election Day 2016 is a day that will live in cyber infamy—the result of a hostile foreign power intentionally attacking our democracy to influence the outcome of the presidential election. I have said repeatedly that this act of cyber warfare must not go unanswered, so I was deeply disturbed that Mr. Tillerson showed so little concern, and offered no plan to respond or hold Russia accountable. Secretary Tillerson’s close personal and business ties with President Putin give me no confidence...

A senior Russian intelligence officer who was arrested on suspicion of treason in December has been charged with passing secrets to the CIA, sources told the Russian news agency Interfax on Tuesday. Sergei Mikhailov was the deputy head of the information security department of the FSB, Russia's national security service. He was arrested along with Dmitry Dokuchaev, a cybersecurity expert who worked as a hacker under the alias "Forb" before joining the FSB; and Ruslan Stoyanov, a key cybercrime investigator at the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. They were arrested shortly after the CIA concluded that Russian hackers, at the Kremlin's...

[Full title and subtitle: DIRTY DOSSIER DEATH Russian spy linked to Donald Trump’s dirty dossier found DEAD in his car in Moscow: Oleg Erovinkin is suspected of being Brit spy Christopher Steele's key source behind widely discredited allegations against President Trump]A FORMER KGB spy chief suspected of helping Brit spook Christopher Steele compile the Trump ‘dirty dossier’ has been found dead in mysterious circumstances.Oleg Erovinkin, described as a key source behind the widely discredited document, was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Boxing Day. Media reports in Russia suggest his death was the result of...

Retired Marine Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright has reportedly lost his security clearance as an investigation into his involvement in national security leaks continues, Foreign Policy reports. Cartwright, a retired four-star general who served for 40 years and last served on the Joint Chiefs, has been the subject of an ongoing investigation into an alleged leak of classified information of the "Stuxnet" virus that targeted and temporarily disabled Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010. The general's legal team has called that assertion "preposterous." Gordon Lubold of FP reports that multiple current and former administration sources said Cartwright lost his clearance earlier this...

An internet security specialist says that Stuxnet, the computer malware that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities in 2010 and widely attributed to Israel and the US, has spiraled out of control and attacked a Russian nuclear plant and the International Space Station.

A retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as the nation’s second-ranking military officer is a target of a Justice Department investigation into a leak of information about a covert U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program, a senior Obama administration official said. Retired Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright served as deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was part of President Obama’s inner circle on a range of critical national security issues before he retired in 2011. The administration official said that Cartwright is suspected of revealing information about a highly classified effort to use a computer virus...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-and-intelligence-community-chiefs-have-urged-obama-to-remove-the-head-of-the-nsa/2016/11/19/44de6ea6-adff-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html …

US National Intelligence Director James Clapper on Thursday warned that America must be ready for a “large, Armageddon-scale” cyber attack, in remarks made at an annual conference of members of the US intelligence community in Washington DC. “Cyber threats to US national and economic security are increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication and the severity of impact,” Clapper warned. “Although we must be prepared for a large, Armageddon-scale strike that would debilitate the entire US infrastructure, it’s not our belief that that’s the most likely scenario.” […] In a sign of the rising concern over the trend of cyber warfare in...

Those who enjoy the deep weeds of politics, especially White Hat/Black Hat intrigue, will find this Reuters Story popcorn worthy. The Back Story – Admiral Michael Rogers, not to be confused with former House Intel Chair Rep. Mike Rogers, is the Director of the NSA (National Security Agency) and U.S. Cyber Command. Admiral Michael Rogers met with President-Elect Trump, somewhat quietly, last week (Thursday).

PRAGUE, October 19. /TASS/. The Russian diplomatic mission in the Czech Republic insists on the return of a Russian national arrested in Prague at the request of the US, Russian Embassy Spokesman Andrey Kolmakov told TASS on Wednesday. "The embassy was officially informed of the Russian national’s detention in the Czech Republic," he stated. "The notice says that he has been detained at the request of one of the US state’s courts." "The embassy has been taking all necessary efforts to protect the interests of this Russian citizen. We are in contact with his attorney. Russia repudiates Washington’s policy of...

UKExpress: PUTIN’S WARNING – Now Russia tells the US ‘if you want a war you will get one EVERYWHERE’ RUSSIA has warned the US it will give America a war if it wants one after Joe Biden called for an all-out cyber assault on Kremlin emails.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The RT broadcaster's accounts have been blocked in the United Kingdom, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said Monday, suggesting that the move stifles free speech. "Our accounts in the UK have been closed. All Accounts. 'The decision is not subject to revision'. Long live freedom of speech!" Simonyan said in a Twitter post.

The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News. Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging "clandestine" cyber operation designed to harass and "embarrass" the Kremlin leadership.