Free Republic

Big-three credit bureau Experian is the target of a class-action lawsuit just filed in California. The suit alleges that Experian negligently violated consumer protection laws when it failed to detect for nearly 10 months that a customer of its data broker subsidiary was a scammer who ran a criminal service that resold consumer data to identity thieves.

Contractors in Argentina and China were given "direct access to every row of data in every database" when they were hired by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to manage the personnel records of more than 14 million federal employees, a federal consultant told ArsTechnica. The massive breach of OPM's database — made public by the Obama administration this month — prompted speculation over why the agency hadn't encrypted its systems, which contain the sensitive security clearance and background information for intelligence and military personnel. Encryption, however, according to Ars, would not have helped in this case because administrators responsible...

Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...

Apple has quietly included a large amount of security fixes in its latest set of patches for its OS X and iOS operating systems, plugging some serious, high-profile vulnerabilities in its code. A tally of the common vulnerability and exposures (CVE) tags in the OS X Yosemite 10.10.4, Security Update 2015-005 and Safari 8.0.7 update packages showed 80 vulnerabilities have been patched by Apple. These range from a flaw that allowed attackers to write to the low-level extensible firmware interface (EFI) - which manages the hardware in Mac computers - when the systems resume from sleep. The EFI zero-day was...

A Windows 10 feature, Wi-Fi Sense, smells like a security risk: it shares access to password-protected Wi-Fi networks with the user's contacts. So giving a wireless password to one person grants access to everyone who knows them. That includes their Outlook.com (nee Hotmail) contacts, Skype contacts and, with an opt-in, their Facebook friends. There is method in the Microsoft madness – it saves having to shout across the office or house “what’s the Wi-Fi password?” – but ease of use has to be tamed with security. If you wander close to a wireless network, and your friend knows the password,...

HP researchers have published details and proof-of-concept exploit code for a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser which allow attackers to bypass a key exploit mitigation. The researchers - part of HP's zero-day initiative team - have a policy to only disclose details of bugs reported to vendors after patches are issued. But the team decided to go public after being informed by Microsoft that it did not intend to fix the bugs as the company feels the vulnerabilities don't affect enough users. The flaws were serious enough, however, for Microsoft to earlier award the HP...

In the aftermath of a shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, that left nine people dead and three others injured, religious groups in Texas are looking for ways to protect their parishioners. Pastor Eric Hallback Sr. from the Rock Faith Center was in bible study when word came of the Charleston tragedy. He said he turned to his faith when heard what happened. “I immediately began to pray for peace and comfort for the families,” he said. Hallback said he understands that people be more worried when they attend church this weekend and there may be a sense...

The US Department of State, DHS, and 14 Democrat Senators, including Senator Kaine (see his press release), are begging for 65,000 Syrian refugees to be settled in our communities and without your consent. Virginia only has 17 Syrian refugees at last count, so is Virginia under review for the next huge wave? As thousands of new immigrants are slated to arrive over the next few years, the chances of rubbing shoulders with Islamic terrorists increase dramatically. According to Refugee Resettlement Watch, the percentage of Muslim refugees in America was close to zero in the 1990’s. By the year 2000 it was 44%. Post...

<p>At least two Apple retail store workers complained directly to Chief Executive Tim Cook that the company's policy of checking retail employees' bags as a security precaution was embarrassing and demeaning, according to a court filing made public on Wednesday.</p>

Two Democratic senators are urging a Senate panel to help cover security costs at the 2016 presidential nominating conventions, saying extra money is needed to ensure law enforcement have sufficient manpower and equipment. In a letter this week, Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio asked the Appropriations Committee for an additional $100 million, to be divided equally between the two conventions. …

How badly the Secret Service was being run You’ve got problems. You’ve got a guy jumping the White House fence, running up the steps and actually making it to the stairway that leads to the residence - with a knife on him. That’s a problem. You’ve got a drunk agent crashing into a White House barricade. You’ve got prostitutes in agents’ hotel rooms . . . yeah, you’ve got problems, Secret Service. So you get a new director. OK. You pretty much had to do that. And then you start hiring a bunch of new agents as quickly as you...

Congressional Democrats are pushing legislation that would ban the production of guns made entirely of plastic, The Hill reported. The Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, proposed in response to recent airport security lapses, would require firearms to contain enough metal to be detected.

....“I thought it was interesting for the president to say that the guy who called ISIS the JV squad and Yemen a success story somehow suggesting someone else should bone up in foreign policy,” Mr. Walker said on ABC’s “This Week.” ....“My belief is if I’m going to — if I’m even thinking about running for president of the United States, it’s not about preparing for debates, it’s about being prepared to be the president of the United States,” he said...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyNew York, NY — June 5, 2015 … US Secretary of the Treasury Jacob J. Lew and Congresswoman Nita Lowey will be among several US and Israeli dignitaries addressing The Jerusalem Post’s fourth Annual Conference. The Conference is scheduled to start on the morning of Sunday, June 7. Israeli and American elected officials, security experts and media analysts will examine the potential Iran nuclear agreement, the future of the US-Israel relationship, and the rise of global anti-Semitism. US Rep. Lowey, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee and a veteran Jewish congresswoman, will also...

WASHINGTON -- Elfriede Rinkel's past as a Nazi concentration camp guard didn't keep her from collecting nearly $120,000 in U.S. Social Security benefits. Rinkel admitted to being stationed at the Ravensbrueck camp during World War II, where she worked with an attack dog trained by the SS, according to U.S. Justice Department records. She immigrated to California and married a German-born Jew whose parents had been killed in the Holocaust. She agreed to leave the U.S. in 2006 and remains the only woman the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit ever initiated deportation proceedings against. Yet after Rinkel departed, the Social Security...

Hot on the heels of news that OS X topped the vulnerabilities charts in April comes Dr. Web's virus activity review for May which shows increasing quantities of adware and unwanted applications targeting the Apple operating system. The company reports several programs aimed at OS X that either install adware, install other applications or inject JavaScript code into webpages. Adware.Mac.InstallCore.1 cannot only install unwanted programs on the user's computer but also change the browser home page and the search engine used by default. The program incorporates debugging functions too -- once launched, it scans the system for the presence of...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)EAST POINT, Ga. — East Point police are investigating a suspicious death involving a security guard. They said Antonio Spear, 32, of Atlanta was found several hundred feet from where investigators believe he was shot to death. East Point firefighters worked to remove a white Ford Expedition after it crashed into a fence just before 7 a.m. Sunday. “I heard a big bang. It was like a bomb so I was like, ‘What is that?” Ryeesha Zellner said. Zellner told Channel 2’s Jessica Jaglois she was sitting in her car outside her job when she saw the SUV crash and...

Friday at the 2015 Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, John Bolton, said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “responsible for the tragedy of the murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans,” in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi Libya. Bolton said, “I think the most telling information that we have seen in this limited number of emails is that there are repeated examples of Secretary of State Clinton being told in 2011 and 2012 that the security situation of our personnel in Tripoli...

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... Networking device manufacturers ZyXEL Communications and Netgear have confirmed that some of their routers are affected by a recently disclosed vulnerability in a USB device-sharing service called NetUSB. ZyXEL will begin issuing firmware updates in June, while Netgear plans to start releasing patches in the third quarter of the year. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2015-3036, is located in a Linux kernel module called NetUSB that's commonly used in routers and other embedded devices. The module is developed by a Taiwan-based company called KCodes Technology and allows routers to share USB devices with other computers via the Internet Protocol (IP)....