Free Republic

The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email. Hackers in London apparently affiliated with “Operation Payback” – a group of supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks – have tried to shut down SarahPac and have disrupted Sarah and Todd Palin’s personal credit card accounts. “No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange's antics,” Palin emailed. “This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts.” Palin has criticized Wikileaks founder...

Oh, it’s seriously bad. Somebody made a grave error, not in designing the program but in simply implementing the web aspect of it. For example, anybody can put up a web page and claim to be a broker for this system. There is no central place where I can go and say, OK, here are all the legitimate brokers, the examiners for all of the states, and pick and choose one. Instead, any hacker can put a website up, make it look extremely competitive, and because of the nature of the system — this is health care, after all —...

Adobe announced Thursday that it was the victim of a hack and that personal data for 2.9 million users were stolen. The software company, known for Photoshop and other programs, said cyber attackers were able to access user information, including account IDs, encrypted passwords as well as credit and debit card numbers. The hackers were able to erase data of some Adobe users. The hackers also illegally accessed source codes for numerous Adobe products. That's like stealing the secret formula for Coca-Cola. The company did not specify which users of its various software programs were hit. "We deeply regret that...

Hackers claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous launched a widespread cyber attack on Israeli citizens, government institutions, and corporations on Wednesday, according to Internet chatter and postings from the self-described hackers. The attack is purportedly being carried out by a nebulous group of hackers who claim affiliation with both Anonymous and the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which supports embattled President Bashar al Assad. Timed to occur on the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the hackers took aim at Israeli banks and government websites over what they claimed are the Jewish state’s multiple crimes. The hackers alternately blamed Israel for...

Anonymous launched #Op SyrianStorm two weeks ago. It is an intensive anti-war phone and email campaign targeting U.S. politicians and media outlets. It started two weeks ago, and is still ongoing. Visibly, participants of the operation are calling senators and congressmen, emailing the president and posting anti-war information on large media outlets' Facebook pages. It is what is going on behind the scenes that make this campaign unlike the many other anti-war crusades. Anonymous is manipulating the search results of major internet outlets to show users information relevant to opposing the war, rather than what they see as propaganda supporting...

Pro-Assad computer hackers today broke into the Marine Corps recruiting website, redirecting visitors to a screed that called President Barack Obama "a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue al- Qaida insurgents." A Marine Corps spokesman confirmed that the site, marines.com, was tampered with and redirected temporarily, but no information was put at risk.

The Washington Post’s Web site was disrupted Thursday morning by a hacker group sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that apparently launched a coordinated wave of attacks on American news outlets. A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army briefly infiltrated The Post’s Web site and redirected readers of some stories to the SEA’s site. The organization supports Assad, who has led a long, bloody campaign to crush a rebellion in Syria. The intrusion lasted for about 30 minutes and affected a number of foreign-news stories. “We’ve taken defensive measures, and at this time there are no other issues affecting...

"When people don't see stuff on Google, they think no one can find it. That's not true." That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet. Unlike Google, which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.) Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and...

While intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill about the country’s secret data-collecting programs, the nation’s top snoop met an even more critical audience Wednesday: Hackers. Gen. Keith Alexander, the embattled head of the U.S. National Security Agency, spoke to a tech-savvy and somewhat hostile crowd gathered at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Nev. — where he unapologetically defended wide-ranging intelligence gathering programs. “You’re the greatest gathering of technical talent in anywhere the world, if we can make this better, the whole reason I came here was to ask you to help us make it better,” Alexander appealed...

For nearly a decade, a band of cybercriminals rampaged through the servers of a global business who's who: Among the victims were 7-Eleven, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, JetBlue and JC Penney. Prosecutors say the hackers stole "conservatively" 160 million credit card numbers, and the dollar value of the crimes they helped facilitate is enormous — just four of the victims are out $300 million. The suffering caused to identity theft victims was "immeasurable," say prosecutors. On Thursday, five of the gang's members were indicted. One is in custody in the U.S., a second is awaiting extradition in the Netherlands, and three...

Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.

(Reuters) - The annual Def Con hacking convention has asked the federal government to stay away this year for the first time in its 21-year history, saying Edward Snowden's revelations have made some in the community uncomfortable about having feds there. ... Last year, four-star General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, was a keynote speaker at the event, which is the world's largest annual hacking conference. The audience was respectful, gave modest applause and also asked about secret government snooping. Alexander adamantly denied that the NSA has dossiers on millions of Americans, as some former employees had...

Max Kelly left his post as Chief Security Officer at Facebook for the NSA in 2010, after having worked with the agency when Facebook joined Prism in 2010 The NSA is increasing recruiting from Silicon Valley and investing in start-ups Facebook recently revealed the NSA made between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for information in the latter half of 2012 It's unclear whether Kelly is directly involved in the NSA's Prism program In a strange reversal, the man who used to be responsible for keeping our Facebook information private and secure is now working for the National Security Agency, the government...

Journalist Michael Hastings was killed early Tuesday morning in a bizarre car incident in Los Angeles. Hastings, 33, was best known for writing the Rolling Stone story that ended in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resignation as head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Hastings’ final story, “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” was a searing take on the NSA snooping scandal, which Hastings described as “North Korea-esque.” Hastings pulled no punches as he linked the NSA scandal to the Department of Justice’s spying on reporters and the IRS abuse scandal. Hastings built a case that the same Democrats who turned Bush-era...

Summary: We know that there's no such thing as a completely secure computer system. Is the NSA the nation's largest security risk of them all? Many are concerned about the National Security Agency (NSA) collection of data on US companies and individuals and the very real possibility that it has a way of directly accessing the servers of the world's largest computing platforms: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. It's certainly a situation that deserves attention and concern. But what's missing in this discussion is this: how secure is the NSA's spying system? If a foreign entity wanted to spy on US...

Hegemony: Chinese President Xi Jinping begins an Americas tour as tensions rise in Asia, Chinese hackers steal our secrets and the administration invites Beijing's growing navy to participate in exercises off Hawaii. Xi Jinping arrived Friday for a two-day summit with President Obama as part of a swing that included stops in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago — a sign of China's rising influence in our backyard and its growth beyond being a regional Asian power. Beijing has quietly responded to our "pivot" to the Pacific by strengthening military, economic and diplomatic ties in our hemisphere while its...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, according to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper.</p> <p>The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.</p>

A new study led by Dennis Blair, who served as President Barack Obama’s first director of national intelligence, and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who served as U.S. ambassador to China from 2009 through 2011 found that the US loses billions in intellectual property to Chinese hackers every year. The report found that an estimated 2.1 million American jobs were lost due to intellectual theft. The report recommends corporations hire what amount to full-time IT security guards who patrol their networks — assisted by automated systems that scan for software behaving strangely, a telltale sign of malware — looking for...

Cyberwar: Chinese hackers have obtained the designs for more than two dozen major U.S. weapon systems, including the Navy's missile defense system and our latest fighter. Our very national survival may soon be at risk. When President Barack Obama meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time on June 7-8 in California, we hope he will not bow but rather demand the Chinese stop their cyberwar against the U.S. that has reaped for them the designs for more than two dozen major weapon systems used by the U.S. military. According to a previously undisclosed section of a confidential...

SNIPPET: "U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports said the websites of Ansar al-Mujahidin, Shumukh al-Islam and Al Fida — all accredited as official outlets of the terrorist group once led by Osama bin Laden — were knocked off the Internet by cyberattacks in early May. Two of the sites — Ansar al-Mujahidin (as-ansar.com) and Shumukh al-Islam (shamikh1.info) — came back up Monday and Tuesday. The site Al Fida remains down." SNIPPET: "The disruptions are prompting many jihadists to shift from Web forums to Twitter for communications and propaganda messaging."