Free Republic

The Pentagon has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups. The U.S. Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election. In the fall of 2008, Russian intelligence agencies penetrated SIPRNet, the Pentagon’s secret internal network; that led to a rush to consolidate several cyberprograms into a command. The Chinese, meanwhile, were stealing weapons designs, including blueprints for...

xactly what killed the computer hacker who gave up Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to the FBI remains a mystery. Forensic pathologists who performed Adrian Lamo's autopsy were unable to determine how the 37-year-old died in March in Wichita. His autopsy report, released Wednesday afternoon, lists Lamo's cause and manner of death as "undetermined." ...

Senior North Korean espionage official 'may have fled to Britain after defecting' By Julian Ryall, tokyo 3 MAY 2018 • 4:51AM North Korea has launched an international manhunt for one of its most senior counter-espionage officers, who disappeared in late February and is believed to have defected, possibly to Britain, according to a media report in South Korea. The official has been identified as a Mr Kang, a colonel in his 50s with the Ministry of State Security and responsible for monitoring dissident and espionage efforts in Russia, China and south-east Asia. He disappeared from the Zhongpu International Hotel in...

A long time ago when I was young I had a job in the military where we were exposed to, used, and changed encryption codes. Compared to today, I assume the methods were primitive, clumsy, and time consuming. This brings us to current events. The use of a private server to handle email for the former Secretary of State may seem to some to be OK, after all, she didn't send many classified emails. But let us assume this, those emails that were unclassified and were sent to her from various people at State and perhaps other places probably has...

Harold Thomas Martin, a 51-year-old US National Security Agency contractor from Maryland, may be remembered as the second Edward Snowden, although there are many differences between the two cases. Martin, a former US Navy officer with top secret national security clearance, was arrested on Aug. 27 by the FBI and charged with the unauthorized removal and retention for many years of highly-sensitive classified documents. The purloined materials found in raids of his home and his car, which were described by as capable of causing “exceptionally grave damage” to US national security. Like Snowden, Martin worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, which...

The Department of Justice has alleged that nine hackers with ties to the Iranian government engaged in a massive cybertheft scheme to steal scientific data and intellectual property from hundreds of U.S. and foreign universities, private companies and government agencies.

A huge range of security exploits, said to be worth over $2m if sold on the black market, have been leaked online.The tools are said to have been created by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and accompanying documents appear to indicate a possible breach of the Swift global banking system.Such a hack could have enabled the US to covertly monitor financial transactions, researchers said.The files were released by Shadow Brokers, a hacking group that has previously leaked malware.If genuine, it represents perhaps the most significant exposure of NSA files since the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013.On Twitter, Mr Snowden...

**TruePundit currently under Denial of Service Attack....

The FBI rounded up a network of deep-cover Russian spies last year after the group came close to placing an agent near a Cabinet official in the Obama administration, a senior FBI counterspy said Monday as the bureau released once-secret documents on the case. ...U.S. officials said it was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Figliuzzi said in an interview that the FBI decided to end its more than 10-year-long counterspy investigation of the network because of concerns that the spies were “getting very close to their objective.” “These 10 Russian officers were sent to the U.S. on a...

WASHINGTON—A suspected Chinese cyberattack on the website of a prominent Washington think tank drew a complaint from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions this week in a meeting with top Chinese government officials. The website of the Hudson Institute crashed earlier this week, shortly before the organization was scheduled to host an event with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese businessman and political dissident who has alleged corruption within China’s leadership. The Institute had several days earlier detected a Shanghai-based attack aimed at shutting down access to its website, according to a spokesman. The spokesman said the attack was foiled, and he...

President Barack Obama reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in October that directly interfering with the U.S. election could result in an "armed conflict." According to NBC News, Obama opted to use the red phone to contact Moscow directly, a communication system that dates back to the Cold War. It's not an actual telephone, but instead sends a secure email message between the two countries. "International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace," part of the Oct. 31 message read, according to NBC. "We will hold Russia to those standards."

The United States has reportedly been engaged in offensive cyberattacks against North Korea, but with no destructive results. According to a report by the Washington Post, President Donald Trump signed a directive earlier this year of putting pressure against North Korea that involved several diplomatic and cyber-military actions, including using cyber activities against the country.US Cyber Command DDoS-ed North Korea The United States Cyber Command, which was elevated to a Unified Combatant Command by the President earlier this year, targeted North Korea’s military spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaign with an aim...

A group calling itself the Islamic State hacking division has published the details of 1,400 mostly US military and government personnel, urging supporters to attack those listed. The spreadsheet, published online on Wednesday, exposes names, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords. Those listed include members of the marine corps, Nasa, the state department, air force and FBI. Supporters of Isis on Twitter seized on the breach, posting personal details of soldiers and government staffers and encouraging lone wolves to “act and kill”. A person claiming to speak for the group told the Guardian the information was obtained from military and...

EXCLUSIVE: Tech company which maintained Hillary's secret server was sued for 'illegally accessing' database and 'stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers' The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House. Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers. It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government. Among the phone numbers which the company took - which all suddenly stopped working - were lines...

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...

Reports of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS . On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot – more than 32 kilometres inland, at Gelendzhik Airport. After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the captain contacted other nearby ships. Their AIS traces – signals from the automatic identification system used to track vessels – placed them all at the same...

As an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, Mohammed Elibiary was given access to sensitive government documents. Now the Texas Muslim activist stands accused of leaking some of those documents to the media to spread charges of "Islamophobia."

Back in October 2010 I warned of the consequences of naming a stealth jihadist with ties to Islamic subversives whose stated goal is to "eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and sabatoage its miserable house."more here ... Secretary Napolitano named devout Muslim Mohamed Elibiary to the Homeland Security Advisory Council (Department of Homeland Security.) Texas Department of Public Safety now says Homeland Security Advisory Council member Mohamed Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet. Who else is the...

In a plot Tom Clancy might have dreamed up, an IT staffer who’d worked for Democrats in Congress was arrested by federal officials and charged with bank fraud. Fox News has reported that officers and agents from the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI and Customs and Border Protection, were involved in the arrest of Imran Awan at Dulles International Airport not far from Washington, D.C., as he tried to fly away to Pakistan. Awan has pleaded not guilty to bank fraud, but his strange case has all the feeling of the opening scene of a movie that might soon include...

The rapid improvement in DNA sequencing has sparked a big data revolution in genomic sciences, which has in turn led to a proliferation of bioinformatics tools. To date, these tools have encountered little adversarial pressure. This paper evaluates the robustness of such tools if (or when) adversarial attacks manifest. We demonstrate, for the first time, the synthesis of DNA which — when sequenced and processed— gives an attacker arbitrary remote code execution. To study the feasibility of creating and synthesizing a DNA-based exploit, we performed our attack on a modified downstream sequencing utility with a deliberately introduced vulnerability. After sequencing,...