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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was among the mourners attending Pope Francis’s funeral in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, on Saturday. Pope Francis had been a supporter of Assange and had even suggested giving him asylum in the Vatican. “Now Julian is free, we have all come to Rome to express our family’s gratitude for the Pope’s support during Julian’s persecution. Our children and I had the honor of meeting Pope Francis in June 2023 to discuss how to free Julian from Belmarsh prison. Francis wrote to Julian in… pic.twitter.com/1B4iNp31Is — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 26, 2025 “Now Julian is free, we...

“They’re coming.” That’s what Miguel, a Venezuelan migrant who came to America with his wife and two daughters, told me about the gang, Tren de Aragua, earlier this year. “And they’re very bad.” The past few days have shown how far the Venezuelan gang appears willing to go. In Aurora, Colorado, Tren de Aragua has allegedly terrorized the local community. According to Mayor Mike Coffman, at least two buildings in the city “have fallen to” a group of armed men, suspected to be gang members. “This is an organized criminal effort. Whether it’s Tren de Aragua, that remains to be...

Apple and Facebook reportedly provided sensitive customer information to hackers who faked being law enforcement officials in 2021. Facebook parent company Meta and Apple gave the hackers basic customer details — such as phone numbers, home addresses, and IP addresses — in response to forged "emergency data requests," Bloomberg reported. Typically, such data requests can only be granted through search warrants or subpoenas provided by a judge, but emergency requests don't require a full-court order. The hackers who duped the companies are affiliated with cybercrime groups known as “Recursion Team,” who have a history of using fake legal requests to...

Indiana University has faced criticism after abruptly firing Professor XiaoFeng Wang on the same day FBI agents executed search warrants at his home. The university also removed the couple’s online profiles, causing concern among academics regarding their due process. Federal authorities have confirmed the investigation is ongoing. Wang has brought approximately $23 million in federal grants to the university. However, Wang was barred from his office and denied access to university resources prior to his dismissal. Veracity IIR president Doug Kouns said, “He’s right there on the cutting edge of this kind of research as far as data privacy, cybersecurity...

Elon Musk: "There was a massive cyber attack to try and bring down X with ip addresses originating in the Ukraine area"

(formerly Twitter) is experiencing its third major outage of the day, with users reporting widespread login and loading issues. The hacking group Dark Storm Team has reportedly claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on the platform, according to a public Telegram post. Newsweek has reached out to the X via email for comment on the matter. What to know: More than 40,000 reports flooded Downdetector during the second outage. The current outage peaked at 29,143 reports and is now slightly declining. Dark Storm Team claims to have targeted X with a cyberattack. Users are unable to access the site, with...

By Wayne Allyn Root In just the past few hours, we have uncovered perhaps the biggest scandal of the Biden presidency. It turns out Joe Biden never signed anything- no laws, no Executive Orders, no legal documents, nothing. They were all signed by autopen. There were no original signatures. Which makes them all illegal. That makes everything that happened and passed during the past four years null and void. But that brings up the question of the century: If Biden never signed anything, who did? Who was calling the shots? Who was running the country? I know the answer… All...

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

WASHINGTON — Former chief information security officer (CISO) for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense is headed back to the Pentagon — this time as DoD’s CISO — following her previous suspension from the department for allegedly disclosing classified data.Katie Arrington served as a state lawmaker for South Carolina and had an unsuccessful bid for Congress before taking her post in 2019 as the chief information officer for A&S during President Donald Trump’s first administration. She played an active role in standing up the department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program before she was put on administrative leave...

Less than three years before Elon Musk tapped him to take part in a sweeping overhaul of the US government, Edward Coristine, then 17, was the subject of a heated dispute between two executives at the Arizona-based cybersecurity firm where he was an intern. At issue was whether to allow Coristine to keep his job even though he was suspected of leaking proprietary information to a competitor. “You’re willing to risk our entire network to a 17-year-old?” one frustrated executive asked the company’s CEO in 2022. “Are you for real right now?” In a recording of the call, reviewed by...

New York -- When a suspicious video of ballots being ripped up in Pennsylvania gained attention on social media last October, federal agencies responded quickly and called it out as Russian disinformation. On Election Day in November, bomb threats to polling places in numerous states caused relatively few disruptions to voting. It’s one of the many scenarios covered by the nation’s cybersecurity agency in its outreach to state and local officials.The Trump administration’s downsizing and disbanding of federal agencies has hit efforts that improve election security and monitor foreign influence. That could create gaps for America’s enemies to exploit the...

Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee announced late on Friday that the state’s data system has been hit with a major cyberattack. McKee will hold an unprecedented press conference Friday at 7:30 PM regarding a cybersecurity breach of the RIBridges system. That system is managed by Deloitte, one of Rhode Island’s largest tech vendors, and the exposed data includes HealthSource, Medicaid, and SNAP. According to McKee’s office, on December 13, [today] the State was informed by its vendor, Deloitte, that there was a major security threat to the RIBridges system. In response, we have proactively taken the system offline so that...

CISA has urged ‘highly targeted’ individuals in the US Government or in senior political positions to immediately review and implement strict security measures with their mobile devices. This comes after multiple major US telecoms firms were hit by security breaches earlier in 2024, most likely originating from state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Recent reports also confirmed that the group behind the attack, Salt Typhoon, had not yet been fully eradicated, and still lurks inside US telecoms networks. As part of its advisory, CISA also released a best practice guide for mobile communications, which includes instructions on using end-to-end encryption, password managers, Fast...

The Trump administration has moved to push out a swathe of federal workers previously involved in combating election-related disinformation, according to three people familiar with the matter, amid allegations from congressional Republicans that their work unfairly targeted conservative speech online. Roughly half a dozen employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who once worked in its Election Security and Resilience division were notified Thursday night they were being put on administrative leave, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

SNIP The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.SNIPOfficials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.SNIP"This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said.MUSK INFLUENCEA team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20,...

Intelligence firm Graphika said a Beijing-linked campaign known as "Spamouflage" spread disinformation about Spain's deadly floods last year. A Chinese online influence operation impersonated a human rights group in Spain to spread calls on social media for the Spanish government to be overthrown following deadly floods in Valencia last year, according to research by intelligence firm Graphika. The Chinese state-linked campaign — dubbed "Spamouflage" by analysts — posed as the Spain-based NGO Safeguard Defenders on social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok and X to circulate content criticising the government's response to the floods that killed at least 225 people last...

Chinese startup DeepSeek - whose new low-cost AI model rattled tech stocks Monday - suffered a large-scale cyberattack, causing it to temporarily limit registrations. Earlier in the day, DeepSeek said it was hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free app in Apple's U.S. App Store and overtook ChatGPT in downloads. DeepSeek claims it uses cheaper chips and less data, challenging the idea that advanced semiconductors, like those made by Nvidia, are needed to run AI applications. That sent major tech stocks tumbling, with shares of Nvidia falling as much as 17.8% at one...

When Attorney General William Barr stated "spying did occur" against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI's surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page. But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence. One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré....

The FBI announced the arrest of a suspect Friday in the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David "Chris" Maland near the Vermont-Canada border. Washington state resident Teresa Youngblut, 21, was taken into custody following the fatal shooting on Monday, according to the FBI’s office in Albany, N.Y. "The United States Attorney’s Office District of Vermont has charged Youngblut with assault on a federal law enforcement officer," it said. "Our hearts remain with our partners at U.S. Border Patrol Swanton Sector as they mourn this tremendous loss."

The federal government is considering new options to aggressively counter foreign cyberattackers, with some in Washington considering the use of private companies to hit back. The Biden administration created new partnerships with thousands of cyber companies, ostensibly to fortify defenses, share information and build resilience. As Republicans take charge across Washington with President Trump at the helm, some policymakers are considering using those private-sector partners in an offensive capacity.During the House Homeland Security Committee’s first hearing of the new Congress, Rep. Clay Higgins questioned CrowdStrike Senior Vice President Adam Meyers about his view on his sector’s lack of ability to...