Free Republic

Iran-backed Hezbollah laundered money through Awan family used-car lot. When IT man Imran Awan attempted to flee the country in July, the feds busted him on bank fraud charges. Imran’s brother Abid ran a used-car lot in Falls Church, Virginia, called Cars International A. Trouble was, the “CIA” dealership had no inventory and the sales people were fakes. As Rosiak learned, the Awan dealership “took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive” whose financial books were “indecipherable.” And as the DEA was aware, “the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism.” On...

A digital security firm got the shock of a lifetime when it came to light that one of its remote workers was actually a North Korean hacker after he infected his new company laptop with malware. "The moment it was received, it immediately started to load malware," security firm KnowBe4 wrote in a blog post about the incident. The company stressed that "no illegal access was gained, and no data was lost, compromised or exfiltrated on any KnowBe4 systems." "KnowBe4 needed a software engineer for our internal IT AI team," the company explained. "We posted the job, received resumes, conducted...

And it’s clear there is far more going on under the hood than meets the eye. Firstly, it all ties into the Trump assassination attempt and ongoing Congressional testimony of Director of Secret Service Kimberly Cheatle. The testimony has revealed there are likely a lot of things being hidden from the public about the would-be assassin Thomas Crooks’, and particularly his potential dealings with the FBI.### Now there’s an investigation by Heritage foundation showing that a digital device visiting Crooks’ home multiple times has been geo-located to having gone to the vicinity of an FBI office in Washington DC in...

A Boston-based cybersecurity company has hired violent Los Angeles Antifa extremist Chad Loder as its Vice President of Security Solutions. Loder has a history of violent extremism and has been permanently banned from the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, for inciting violence. He has publicly supported domestic terrorists and cold-blooded murderers, including Antifa gunman Michael Reinhoel and Antifa bomber Willem Van Spronsen. Loder has been named the VP of Security Solutions at CyberSN and will work alongside the company's founder and CEO Deidre Diamonds, according to CyberSN, a cybersecurity workforce risk management and strategy group. [snip] Loder, a far-left...

It can cause more harm than good! Key Features ·CrowdStrike shows the havoc that can be wreaked by supposed security software. ·Most people don't need third-party antivirus software. ·Most modern-day threats are aimed at exploiting humans, not computers.

undreds of flights were cancelled at British airports yesterday due to the fault ... Travel disruption is continuing today as trains are hit in Crowdstrike outage with ticket machines and scanners going down at London stations. The meltdown chaos comes after the world's biggest IT disaster struck, with thousands of Brits stranded abroad. It happened on one of year's busiest travel days, with families now desperately queuing at Dover Port in an attempt to get home. After another 45 flights were cancelled today, 28,000 Brits are fighting to get a seat on a plane. Some passengers stuck overseas have been...

July 19 (Reuters) - A global tech outage was disrupting operations across multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off air and services from banking to healthcare hit by system problems. While major U.S. airlines - American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab, Delta Airlines (DAL.N), opens new tab and United Airlines (UAL.O), opens new tab - grounded flights, other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions early on Friday. Banks and financial services firms from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions. In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple...

Telecommunications giant Frontier Communications on Thursday informed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that certain systems were shut down following a cyberattack. The incident, the company said in a regulatory filing with the SEC, was identified on April 14, when a third-party “gained unauthorized access to portions of its information technology environment”. Frontier said it immediately initiated its incident response protocols and took steps to contain the incident, including shutting down certain systems, which “resulted in an operational disruption that could be considered material”. According to Frontier, the attack was likely the work of a cybercrime group that gained access...

Chinese hackers are preparing to launch a major attack on critical U.S. infrastructure and have already infiltrated multiple companies according to the FBI. FBI Director Chris Wray revealed today China is developing the capability to cause significant damage to our critical infrastructure at a time of their choosing. The only question is the time to launch a catastrophic blow. “China is developing the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian...

Last May I wrote about a group of Chinese hackers who'd been identified by Microsoft after malware was discovered in telecom systems on the island of Guam. Microsoft named the hacking group "Volt Typhoon."Microsoft called the hacking group “Volt Typhoon” and said that it was part of a state-sponsored Chinese effort aimed at not only critical infrastructure such as communications, electric and gas utilities, but also maritime operations and transportation. The intrusions appeared, for now, to be an espionage campaign. But the Chinese could use the code, which is designed to pierce firewalls, to enable destructive attacks, if they choose.Today,...

Tech giant Microsoft disclosed on Tuesday evening that it discovered a group of Chinese hackers had broken into some of its customers' email systems to gather intelligence. The company began investigating unusual activity within a few weeks of the initial attack, though the culprits were able to repeatedly manipulate credentials to access accounts. According to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, one federal government agency first detected unusual activity on its Microsoft 365 email cloud environment last month, and immediately reported the activity to Microsoft and CISA. CISA did not identify the government agency in question...

A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are attempting large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — with hackers of one company claiming to be able to target users of Microsoft, Apple and Google. The cache — containing more than 570 files, images and chat logs — offers an unprecedented look inside the operations of one of the firms that Chinese government agencies hire for on-demand, mass data-collecting operations. The files — posted to GitHub last week and deemed credible by cybersecurity experts, although the source...

Beijing, now Moscow.… Who else is hiding in broadband gateways?The US government today said it disrupted a botnet that Russia's GRU military intelligence unit used for phishing expeditions, spying, credential harvesting, and data theft against American and foreign governments and other strategic targets. This latest court-authorized takedown happened in January, and involved neutralizing "well over a thousand" home and small business routers that had been infected with the Moobot malware, which is a Mirai variant, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, speaking at the Munich Cyber Security Conference on Thursday. Moobot can be used to remote-control compromised devices and launch...

In a bombshell ruling, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has shut down the “nerve center” of federal government-led speech policing, correcting a critical error in its prior jurisprudence and striking a major blow for the First Amendment and against deep-state election interference. The court’s opinion comes in the landmark free speech case in the digital era, Missouri v. Biden. Before the litigation landed in appellate court, Louisiana District Judge Terry A. Doughty declared in a fitting Independence Day ruling that federal authorities from the Biden White House to the FBI and CDC had likely engaged in “the most...

The former head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said that the Republican Party was in a “death spiral” owing to its allegiance to former President Donald Trump. Mr Krebs, who famously contradicted Mr Trump’s claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election before being terminated from his post last year, is a self-described lifelong member of the GOP. On Sunday, he spoke with CBS’s Face the Nation about his party and the former president’s ongoing efforts to sow distrust about US voting systems. “This is a death spiral. They’ve lost control, and they...

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, investigative reporter Lara Logan reported that the crash of the Dali cargo ship into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was not an accident but rather a “strategic attack.” Hours after the Dali cargo ship crashed into the Key bridge, taking the lives of six men, the Democrat Governor of Maryland, in a press conference, stated, “The preliminary investigation points to an accident. We haven’t seen any credible evidence of a terrorist attack.” Many believed Moore and the NTSB’s quick assessment to rule out terrorism raised red flags, considering the NTSB’s preliminary analysis...

A Chinese Private security contractor linked to communist China’s top policing agency suffered a major leak this week, as hundreds of private documents exposed the country’s surveillance tactics against dissidents, and also its cyber warfare capabilities for a potential cyberattack against its adversaries like the United States, as it enters most important election in history. The Security contractor, I-Soon, which has ties to the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), suffered a leak of private documents showing it provided the Chinese government with powerful tools to target dissidents, anti-government activists, and ethnic minorities such as Muslims.

Two sources briefed on the situation told ABC News that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among other agencies, are now urgently investigating to determine whether the AT&T outages are the result of a cyber attack or a hack, or simply some sort of technical malfunction. More than 73,000 AT&T customers reported outages on digital-service tracking site DownDetector. That's not a comprehensive number: It tracks only self-reported outages. Although outage reports fell a bit in the 5 am ET hour, they bounced back in the 7 am ET hour and continue to surge. Several local governments said AT&T's...

The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to shutter its last two consulates in Russia over caps set by Moscow on the number of diplomats that are allowed in the country. In a letter to congressional leaders sent Dec. 10 and obtained by The Hill, the administration said it will permanently close its Vladivostok consulate and temporarily halt work at the consulate in Yekaterinburg. The letter confirming the closures was sent three days before news broke of a major hack of U.S. government agencies that is believed to have been conducted by an elite Russian cyber espionage unit....

A January 2024 court-authorized operation has neutralized a network of hundreds of small office/home office (SOHO) routers that GRU Military Unit 26165, also known as APT 28, Sofacy Group, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, and Sednit, used to conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes. These crimes included vast spearphishing and similar credential harvesting campaigns against targets of intelligence interest to the Russian government, such as U.S. and foreign governments and military, security, and corporate organizations. In recent months, allegations of Unit 26165 activity of this type has been the subject of a private sector cybersecurity advisory