Free Republic

President-elect Donald J. Trump appears to side with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over United States intelligence agencies, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence backing him up. ... For the Republican Party, Mr. Assange,..., was once purely a villain. He found little sympathy with conservatives after he leaked American military secrets from Iraq, published purloined diplomatic cables that could have gotten American sources killed and sought refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, fleeing charges of rape. But now, Mr. Trump appears to be siding with Mr. Assange over the conclusions of America’s intelligence services. Julian Assange said "a 14 year...

As federal officials investigate suspicious Internet activity found last week on a Vermont utility computer, they are finding evidence that the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility, according to experts and officials close to the investigation.

As Barack Obama began preparing to leave office, the first smartphone-toting U.S. president ordered his team to upgrade the White House’s aging technology for his successor. New computers were purchased and faster internet was installed. Not included in the modernization plans? A courier service. But that delivery method of a bygone era may be in for a comeback under Donald Trump. Despite his voracious use of Twitter, the president-elect appears to be leaning toward old tech to ensure the security of sensitive messages. “It’s very important, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by...

The Obama administration announced sanctions on Thursday against Russia and released a report that stated that the Russian government deployed computer hackers to attack the Democratic Party’s computers. Follow Link to diagram

A hacking group linked to the Russian government and high-profile cyber attacks against Democrats likely used a malware implant on Android devices to track and target Ukrainian artillery units from late 2014 through 2016. The malware was able to retrieve communications and some locational data from infected devices, intelligence that would have likely been used to strike against the artillery in support of pro-Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine. The malware used to track Ukrainian artillery units was a variant of the kind used to hack into the Democratic National Committee. [a nice multi-use malware, almost like the Swiss knife]...

Only just finding out about it nowRussian hackers working for Tsar Putin took down the US Pentagon in 2015 in a hack which caused a secret revamp of systems. The unclassified email system used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff was hijacked in the attack, leaving data of nearly 3,500 military personnel and civilians vulnerable to exposure. It was believed to have been an attempt at crippling the Pentagon's systems, instead of a cyberespionage campaign, but the attack did not exactly come off as planned. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told CBS News that the NSA director Admiral...

President Barack Obama defended his response to Russia after Wikileaks published emails from top Democrats which disrupted the elections. “I told Russia to stop it, and indicated there will be consequences when they do it,” he said to reporters during a press conference on Friday. Obama said that he personally challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin behind the scenes, but he let law enforcement handle the investigations and the release of information. “In early September when I saw President Putin in China I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly...

RNC officials, concerned they too might have been compromised, called a private computer security firm, which in turn called the FBI and obtained information about what kinds of malicious emails to look for, the person said. Upon inspection, the RNC found that its electronic filters had blocked emails sent to a former employee matching the description they’d been warned about. The apparently successful blocking of a Russian espionage operation offers one possible explanation why the GOP’s main political organization didn’t suffer the same fate as its Democratic counterpart—a deluge of leaked emails revealing private correspondence and internal strategy.

The Obama administration didn't respond more forcefully to Russian hacking before the presidential election because they didn't want to appear to be interfering in the election and they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win and a potential cyber war with Russia wasn't worth it, multiple high-level government officials told NBC News. "They thought she was going to win, so they were willing to kick the can down the road," said one U.S official familiar with the level of Russian hacking. The administration did take action in response to the hack prior to the election. In September, President Obama...

A Clinton campaign aide says that a typo in a March 19 email sent to John Podesta is to blame for opening the campaign chairman’s Gmail account up to Russian cyber hackers. The IT aide, Charles Delavan, tells The New York Times that his error — typing the word “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” to describe a hacker’s email — continues to haunt him. “This is a legitimate email,” Delavan wrote to Clinton campaign aide Sara Latham after she forwarded him an spear phishing email designed to look like official correspondence from Google. “John needs to change his password immediately,” Delavan...

This whole Russian hackers may be Wiki's source of HRC's emails and that means the Russians "hacked the election" narrative reminds me very much of the stunt an ambassador named Joe Wilson pulled in 2002, with the help of the New York Times. Anyone remember this? It was not long after G.W. Bush's State of the Union address, where Bush said that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy enriched uranium from Africa (presumably to make weapons of mass destruction.) Joe Wilson, who was a liberal, decided to "investigate" this claim. He went to one country, Niger, for about 10 days...

On Thursday, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ask “why [it] was attempting to breach” the firewall protecting his computer infrastructure. The letter also drew attention to the fact that “under 18 U.S.C. 1030, attempting to gain access or exceeding authorized access to protected computer systems is illegal."In the weeks and months leading up to the elections, DHS and other federal agencies expressed growing concerns over the threat of Russian hackers penetrating government computers. Many of those concerns were based in the oft-repeated claim that the hacking of the...

U.S. President Barack Obama ordered intelligence agencies to review cyber attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report before he leaves office on Jan. 20, homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said on Friday. Monaco told reporters the results of the report would be shared with lawmakers and others. "The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process ... and to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders, to include the Congress," Monaco said during an event hosted by the...

The incoming Trump administration is being advised to train 100,000 hackers. The new president should also make an effort to develop international norms for hacking, essentially drawing red lines to avoid cyber warfare or even armed conflict. President Obama's special Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity released its long-awaited report Friday night. In it, the panel outlines a challenging to-do list that makes clear cybersecurity is a top national priority. Computer hacking is now commonplace and more dangerous than ever....

WASHINGTON (AP) -- New evidence appears to show how hackers earlier this year stole more than 50,000 emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, an audacious electronic attack blamed on Russia's government and one that has resulted in embarrassing political disclosures about Democrats in the final weeks before the U.S. presidential election. The hackers sent John Podesta an official-looking email on Saturday, March 19, that appeared to come from Google. It warned that someone in Ukraine had obtained Podesta's personal Gmail password and tried unsuccessfully to log in, and it directed him to a website where he should "change your password...

Twitter user's outrage at the stupidity of the Clinton campaign's cavalier attitude towards cyber security -- check out the passwords on Hillary's and Podesta's accounts!

For more than two hours on Friday morning, much of the web seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in the United States. More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com. They included The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others. How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?

So, let's say that the Democrats really are telling the truth and Russian hackers are behind all the embarrassing hacking going on of the DNC and various federal agencies (notice they don't dispute what the hacks reveal, only who's doing them) and we know Democrats are trying myriad ways to commit vote fraud in this election, it would not be too far a reach to think Russian hackers might have access to vote tabulation centers in the U.S. to change the results of the American vote in favor of Trump.

Updated | I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns about not only Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters. An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros, at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by WikiLeaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to WikiLeaks out...

Hackers have made their way into state election systems “in a few cases,” but the federal government hasn’t found “any manipulation” so far of voting information, the Homeland Security secretary said Saturday. Twenty-one states have contacted the agency for help in safeguarding their election systems, and Jeh Johnson is urging additional requests for cybersecurity assistance. “We hope to see more,” Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. A department official told The Associated Press on Friday that hackers have targeted the voter registration systems of more than 20 states in recent months. The official, who was not authorized to publicly...