Free Republic

"It could have been worse," one owner incredibly concluded. It’s a tale as old as… the Internet of Things era. Robot vacuums made by Ecovacs have been reported roving around people’s homes, yelling profanities at them through the onboard speakers after the company’s software was found to be vulnerable to intrusion. ABC News in Australia reports that there were recently multiple instances across the U.S. when owners of Ecovacs vacuums noticed their devices acting unusually. “It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” Daniel Swenson told the outlet. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.” He opened the...

Donald Trump says a federal case needs to be brought against Kamala Harris after it was revealed Iran sent sensitive materials to her campaign about her rival... ...on Wednesday, the FBI claimed the cyber-terrorists sent unsolicited emails containing stolen information from the Trump campaign to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, is now questioning why the Biden or Harris campaign did not turn over this information or report it to authorities... There's no evidence that any of the recipients of the hacked information responded, officials said, and...

Adrian Lamo, the computer hacker who reported Chelsea Manning to authorities for sharing classified documents with WikiLeaks, was found dead in an apartment in Wichita, Kansas, last week, according to local reports. Lamo, whose cause of death has yet to be reported but has been deemed unsuspicious by police, was 37, the Wichita Eagle reported. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and [acquaintances] that he is dead,” his father, Mario Lamo, posted on Facebook on Friday. “A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son.” Lamo...

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...

Paging all terrorists! Thousands of Hezbollah terrorists were injured in southern Lebanon on Tuesday when their new pagers all simultaneously exploded — causing horrifying burns to their groins and hands as the devices detonated on their belts and in their pockets. Lebanese officials said 2,800 people were injured and eight killed in what Hezbollah officials claimed was a hacking attack by Israel.

The Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was hit by an apparent cyberattack over the weekend, which has caused major internet outages affecting the airport's phones, email, and other systems. Port of Seattle officials are continuing to work on Monday to restore the airport's systems, which is the third day that the airport has been impacted by the attack. The airport has encouraged travelers to use their mobile phones to get their boarding passes, and to allow extra time at the airport to get to their gates. “We’re working around the clock to get necessary systems back online and to mitigate impacts to...

Oh woe is us! Hackers have found vulnerabilities in voting machines and, gee whiz, there is just no way to fix them before the November election. At least that is what the Politico cybersecurity reporter Maggie Miller would like you to believe.However, there is a certain word very conveniently missing from her story on Monday and that missing word is "paper," as in "paper ballots," which you will find nowhere in "The nation’s best hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but no time to fix them."

bout four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data. The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.   The new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019.  It does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.  According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions...

Ten days after a cybersecurity threat shut down dozens of routine services and threw a wrench into daily city business, Cleveland City Hall is planning—finally—to reopen Thursday at noon. On June 10, the city announced a "cyber attack" had hindered regular operations, leading to a sudden shut down, which meant hundreds of employees working remote and residents shut out from the building. Days later, the attack was categorized as ransomware, meaning hackers had penetrated an open door in the city's digital infrastructure and potentially held files or servers hostage. It's unclear if Clevelanders' personal data was comprised, as is possible...

Hackers targeted several high-profile TikTok accounts, including hotel heiress Paris Hilton’s — and planted malicious code on the official page of CNN, according to reports. The malware is being spread through TikTok via its direct messaging function, Forbes reported on Tuesday. The hack is a so-called “zero-day” attack — meaning that the hacker learned of the vulnerability before the software developers who thus have “zero days” to prevent it. Certain attacks are exploited through vulnerabilities that sometimes take the developers days or weeks to discover. CNN was forced to take down its TikTok account for several days after a hacker...

We already know that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was completely unjustified and unnecessary for many reasons …***Now we're learning that due to a secret Obama-era program, the Presidential Information Technology Committee (PITC), there's a very good chance that the Biden Administration has had control of the originals of many, or all of the documents at issue this entire time.The PITC was created in March 2015 by Executive Order in response to an October 2014 incident in which Russian hackers breached Executive Office of the President computers. ...A 2015 Memorandum of Understanding between the members of the PITC set out the...

Last May I wrote about a group of Chinese hackers who'd been identified by Microsoft after malware was discovered in telecom systems on the island of Guam. Microsoft named the hacking group "Volt Typhoon."Microsoft called the hacking group “Volt Typhoon” and said that it was part of a state-sponsored Chinese effort aimed at not only critical infrastructure such as communications, electric and gas utilities, but also maritime operations and transportation. The intrusions appeared, for now, to be an espionage campaign. But the Chinese could use the code, which is designed to pierce firewalls, to enable destructive attacks, if they choose.Today,...

Beijing, now Moscow.… Who else is hiding in broadband gateways?The US government today said it disrupted a botnet that Russia's GRU military intelligence unit used for phishing expeditions, spying, credential harvesting, and data theft against American and foreign governments and other strategic targets. This latest court-authorized takedown happened in January, and involved neutralizing "well over a thousand" home and small business routers that had been infected with the Moobot malware, which is a Mirai variant, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the Munich Cyber Security Conference on Thursday. Moobot can be used to remote-control compromised devices and launch...

Customers of Ethiopia's largest bank had a nice surprise this week when a glitch allowed them to withdraw unlimited funds. More than $40 million was withdrawn from the state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) or transferred to other banks, and recouping it isn't going to be easy... By the time the bank realized what was going on and froze transactions a few hours later, more than 2.4 billion Ethiopian birr (around $40 million) had been withdrawn or moved to other banks... much of the money had been withdrawn by students. News that the CBE was giving away unlimited money spread...

WASHINGTON—A post on a hacker forum popular with cybercriminals has claimed UnitedHealth Group paid $22 million in a bid to recover access to data and systems encrypted by the “Blackcat” ransomware gang, according to two researchers. Neither UnitedHealth nor the hackers involved have commented on the alleged ransom payment, but a cryptocurrency tracing firm partially corroborated the claim on Monday. It is not uncommon for large companies that have been victimized by ransomware gangs to decide to pay the hackers to regain control of their networks, especially in instances where a significant disruption to customers and partners occurred. The forum...

The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to shutter its last two consulates in Russia over caps set by Moscow on the number of diplomats that are allowed in the country. In a letter to congressional leaders sent Dec. 10 and obtained by The Hill, the administration said it will permanently close its Vladivostok consulate and temporarily halt work at the consulate in Yekaterinburg. The letter confirming the closures was sent three days before news broke of a major hack of U.S. government agencies that is believed to have been conducted by an elite Russian cyber espionage unit....

The looming threat of a major cyber attack against the U.S. is becoming more likely after the FBI admitted that Chinese hackers are planning an all-out assault on the country’s power grid and infrastructure. A cyber attack against the United States would not just be devastating for Americans; it would also allow China to take advantage of the ensuing chaos, especially with it being an election year. According to U.S. officials, they have already foiled a state-backed Chinese effort to plant malware to damage civilian infrastructure.

Federal agencies have less than 24 hours to disconnect Ivanti VPN appliances due to the risk of malicious exploitation caused by multiple software flaws. On Wednesday, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA blasted out an updated emergency directive ordering U.S. government agencies to act "as soon as possible and no later than 11:59 PM on Friday February 2, 2024." Agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, must disconnect all Ivanti VPN appliances because hackers may exploit the vulnerabilities and compromise agency information systems. "The vulnerabilities in these products pose significant, unacceptable risks to the security of the...

Russians did not hack the DNC system, a Russian named Dmitri Alperovitch is the hacker and he works for President Obama. In the last five years the Obama administration has turned exclusively to one Russian to solve every major cyber-attack in America, whether the attack was on the U.S. government or a corporation.  Only one “super-hero cyber-warrior” seems to “have the codes” to figure out “if” a system was hacked and by “whom.”