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A cyber group known as “Purgatory” is behind a terrifying spree of AI-enhanced swatting calls on college campuses — and experts urge authorities to catch up to “internet speed” to stop it. Between Aug. 21 and Aug. 25, at least 10 universities across the US were thrown into chaos after fake active shooter calls sent armed federal and local law enforcement agencies to lockdown campuses, launching students into full-blown panic. The calls have since been linked to Purgatory, a group of cybercriminals who use AI tools to replicate sounds of screaming and gunfire while on the phone with local authorities,...

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has instructed factory staff to stay at home until at least Tuesday as the company continues to grapple with the fallout from a cyber attack. The attack at the weekend forced the company to take vital IT systems offline, which has affected car sales and production. Production remains halted at car factories in Halewood on Merseyside and Solihull in the West Midlands, as well as at its engine manufacturing centre in Wolverhampton. The situation remains under review and output could remain suspended for longer. Car sales have also been heavily disrupted, although the BBC understands some...

From:simons@acm.org To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-04-15 03:35 Subject: The Democracy Alliance meeting Dear John, I am following up on our very brief discussion, held as you were leaving the DA meeting, about Hillary Clinton's emails. I've included a summary of the issues and a precautionary step that I think should be taken. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. Regards, Barbara

Government agencies from around the world, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA), shared a new advisory Wednesday warning of China's "global espionage system." The advisory details how state-backed threat actors, including Salt Typhoon, penetrate networks around the world, as well as how defenders can protect their own environments. The document was cosigned by nations including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. The advisory tracks this cluster of activity to multiple advanced persistent threats (APTs), though they say it partially...

Anti-extremism researchers say they have identified a group claiming responsibility for the hoax active-shooter calls that led to massive police responses and widespread panic at Villanova University and other colleges as students returned to campus last week. Members of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said Wednesday they believe the source of the calls is a group dubbed Purgatory, part of an online threat network called “The Com” that exists at the “intersection of extremism, cybercrime, child abuse, and violence,” according to the nonprofit, which was formed in 2020 by former members of the Southern Poverty Law...

A Chinese national was sentenced today to four years in prison and three years of supervised release for writing and deploying malicious code on his then-employer’s network. “The defendant breached his employer’s trust by using his access and technical knowledge to sabotage company networks, wreaking havoc and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for a U.S. company,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “However, the defendant’s technical savvy and subterfuge did not save him from the consequences of his actions. The Criminal Division is committed to identifying and prosecuting those...

Experts have warned hackers recently used a generative AI tool to replicate several web pages belonging to the Brazilian government in an effort to steal sensitive personal information and money. The fake websites were examined by Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers, who discovered multiple indicators of the use of AI to generate code. The websites look almost identical to the official sites, with the hackers using SEO poisoning to make the websites appear higher in search results, and therefore seem more legitimate. AI generated government websites In the campaign examined by ThreatLabz, two websites were spotted mimicking important government portals. The first...

By: Collin Campbell @ProjectConstitu(Watch The Video Here) https://x.com/ProjectConstitu/status/1893527590087852473Feb 22, 2025 - Washington, D.C. In a stunning and unprecedented move, President Donald Trump has fired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officers in the United States, following allegations of a plot to undermine his authority. The dramatic shakeup, announced late Friday night, February 21, 2025, stems from a controversial video released by investigative journalist James O’Keefe on January 15, 2025, which purportedly exposed a high-level Pentagon official discussing secret meetings to defy and potentially overthrow Trump if he issued orders deemed controversial by military leadership. The firings have ignited...

Charles McGonigal may be the most corrupt FBI official in modern history—and yet somehow, his name has barely made a blip on the radar. This wasn’t some mid-level pencil-pusher. McGonigal was one of the top counterintelligence agents at the FBI’s New York field office. He was directly involved in the bureau’s most sensitive operations, including the infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” probe into (phony) Trump–Russia “collusion.” And after that whole fraudulent mess, it turns out that he was secretly taking money from a Kremlin-linked oligarch and helping shake down Albanian oligarchs on the side. You can’t make this up, right? Now here...

Anxious FBI chiefs are trawling through 'numerous' top-level investigations spanning 22 years for fear they were compromised by convicted bureau spook Charles McGonigal, DailyMail.com can reveal. The forensic clean-up operation ranges over the entire time the philandering former head of counterintelligence in New York worked for the agency. McGonigal, 55, has already been sentenced to four years and two months in prison for taking money and conspiring with a sanctioned Russian oligarch who is a crony of despot President Vladimir Putin. But the full possible repercussions of his treachery are outlined in a sentencing memorandum by the US government for...

OpenAI's ChatGPT can easily be coaxed into leaking your personal data — with just a single "poisoned" document. As Wired reports, security researchers revealed at this year's Black Hat hacker conference that highly sensitive information can be stolen from a Google Drive account with an indirect prompt injection attack. In other words, hackers feed a document with hidden, malicious prompts to an AI that controls your data instead of manipulating it directly with a prompt injection, one of the most serious types of security flaws threatening the safety of user-facing AI systems. ChatGPT's ability to be linked to a Gmail...

Republicans lawmakers have uncovered “troubling allegations” that President Biden’s suspended special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, stored classified material on his personal email account and cellphone — which was later accessed by a “hostile cyber actor.” The top Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committee on Monday asked the State Department to confirm the allegations against Malley, who was quietly placed on unpaid leave last June and had his security clearance suspended amid a State Department investigation reportedly centered on his potential mishandling of classified information. The State Department has refused to reveal the exact nature...

Local, state and federal agencies are investigating a cyberattack against the City of St. Paul. Governor Tim Walz on Tuesday announced he has activated the Minnesota National Guard to assist in the response to the attack, at the city’s request. According to the Governor’s Office, “the magnitude and complexity of the cybersecurity incident have exceeded the city’s response capacity.”

Microsoft has announced the removal of China-based technical personnel from its Department of Defense cloud maintenance operations, responding to revelations about foreign engineer involvement in sensitive military computing systems.The tech giant’s decision follows investigative reporting by Pro Publica that exposed how Chinese engineers participated in maintaining cloud infrastructure for America’s military establishment. The arrangement previously operated under a supervision model utilizing “digital escorts” – cleared U.S. personnel tasked with overseeing foreign technical staff.

China’s Ministry of State Security Directed the Theft of COVID-19 Research and the Exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Server Vulnerabilities, Known Publicly as the Indiscriminate ‘HAFNIUM’ Intrusion CampaignThe Justice Department announced today that Xu Zewei (徐泽伟), 33, of the People’s Republic of China was arrested on July 3 in Italy at the request of the United States. Xu and his co-defendant, PRC national Zhang Yu (张宇), 44, are charged in a nine-count indictment, unsealed today in the Southern District of Texas, for their involvement in computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021, including the indiscriminate HAFNIUM computer intrusion campaign that...

A former National Intelligence Officer for Cyber under President Trump and Joe Biden has come forward with explosive allegations: the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) deliberately buried evidence of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in the 2020 presidential election—and fired him when he refused to play along. The whistleblower’s damning post came in response to General Mike Flynn’s tweet Monday questioning why foreign election interference by the CCP wasn’t exposed back in 2020: “So there was foreign interference by the CCP in the 2020 presidential election. Who was running the USIC at that time and...

Microsoft warns patched systems remain vulnerable as attackers find new ways to infiltrate SharePoint servers. Microsoft has issued a critical warning about Chinese state-backed hackers exploiting security flaws in its SharePoint software. These vulnerabilities have been used to compromise a growing list of government agencies and private organizations worldwide, including the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In a detailed blog post, Microsoft identified three hacking groups with ties to China. The groups, known as Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603, are believed to have taken advantage of SharePoint weaknesses that mainly affect customers who operate the software on their...

6,479 0:55:38 0.3 mps EP134: EXPOSED: Microsoft Allowed China Access To DOD Cyber Systems Laura Loomer 82.7K followers GetLoomered Follow 289 0 Chat Comments Share Save Embed Report Go Ad-Free with Rumble Premium Enjoy content without interruptions! Streaming now 17 News Politics On Episode 134 of Loomer Unleashed, Laura will be joined by Navy whistleblower and CEO of Next Defense Tom Schiller, who exposed how a 2016 Obama-approved Microsoft contract gave the CCP backdoor access to all US government cyber systems.

He walks with a cane and is a bit hard of hearing. Yet Boris Chertok, 95, a former deputy chief designer in the Soviet bureau that put the first Sputnik satellite into orbit 50 years ago, still has strong opinions on the evolution of the country's space program. Chertok says the free-market changes instituted by President Boris Yeltsin after the Soviet Union fell apart were disastrous for Russian science. "We need to restore what we have lost over 15 years of destructive reforms," said Chertok, whose very name was once a state secret. "The market economy is incapable of fulfilling...

SAN FRANCISCO, May 9 - The incident seemed alarming enough: a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet. Now federal officials and computer security investigators have acknowledged that the Cisco break-in last year was only part of a more extensive operation - involving a single intruder or a small band, apparently based in Europe - in which thousands of computer systems were similarly penetrated. Investigators in the United States and Europe say they have spent almost a year pursuing the case involving...