Free Republic

It's being called the largest ever breach of protected patient health information by a government-regulated medical company in America's history. Change Healthcare, owned by UnitedHealth Group, fell victim to a cyberattack eight months ago, but revealed on Thursday that 100 million people had been impacted. That surpassed the previous recordholder for worst breach of US patient data: a 2015 episode at Anthem Inc. that compromised 78.8 million individuals. The first official report by Change Healthcare, which manages revenue and payments for medical providers, estimated in July that only 500 people had been compromised. Now, the scope of the February 21...

China has emerged as the most prolific intelligence threat to U.S. having engaged in corporate espionage, intellectual-property theft, and personnel information breaches going back decades. A naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from China has been sentenced to four years in prison after conspiring to act as a agent of the Chinese government, highlighting the broad reach of Beijing’s security service and strategy of co-opting immigrants for intelligence gathering, according to the Justice Department. The plea agreement and court filings announced Monday show China’s Ministry of State Security – the Communist-run country's intelligence service – used operative Peng Li as a...

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has long pushed back against the establishment of a new military service dedicated to cyberspace, but with President-elect Donald Trump on his way back to the White House, a separate cyber force has a real shot at becoming a reality, according to experts and to lawmakers who support the move.“This change in administration potentially could give more impetus to the creation of a separate cyber service,” Quentin Hodgson, formerly the Pentagon’s director of Cyber Plans, told Breaking Defense. “[Trump] did that with the Space Force. It was something that the Department of Defense didn’t want, but...

Multiple U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, have been breached by a Chinese hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon, the Wall Street Journal reports. The purpose of the attack appears to be intelligence collection as the hackers might have had access to systems used by the U.S. federal government for court-authorized network wiretapping requests. It is unclear when the intrusion occurred, but WSJ cites people familiar with the matter, saying that "for months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data." Salt Typhoon is...

The leak of high-classified U.S. intelligence documents to the Iranian regime last week has triggered a much-needed counter-intelligence investigation to identify the source -- either a mole who has betrayed their country, or a cyber-hack. The documents, which bore Top Secret/NOFORN and compartmented intelligence headers, described U.S. satellite spying on Israeli airfields as the IDF conducted exercises believed to foreshadow a massive airstrike on Iran. The NOFORN designation means that the document cannot be shared with foreign nationals other than members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing arrangement the United States has crafted with the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee overseeing technology issues will hold a hearing Tuesday on Chinese hacking incidents, including a recent incident involving American telecom companies. The hearing to be chaired by Senator Richard Blumenthal will review the threats "Chinese hacking and influence pose to our democracy, national security, and economy," his office said, adding the senator plans "to raise concerns about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest with China as Mr. Musk becomes increasingly involved in government affairs." Musk, the head of electric car company Tesla, social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX, emerged during the election...

We’re approaching the four-year anniversary of the infamous January 6 pipe bomb case, and still the FBI pretends to be clueless as to the identity of the suspect. In this same span of time, Revolver News is proud to have broken countless stories regarding the pipe bomb case that overwhelmingly point toward a government cover-up involving the FBI, ATF, the Secret Service, Capitol Police, and even Kamala Harris herself. The evidence is so damning that we have long referred to the January 6 pipe bombs as one of the two smoking guns of the Fedsurrection (the other smoking gun being...

Russian actors made a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania, U.S. officials said Friday. A video that showed mail-in ballots for Trump apparently being destroyed in a suburban Philadelphia county took off quickly on social media Thursday afternoon. U.S. officials said in a statement sent by the FBI that they believe the video was “manufactured and amplified” by Russian actors. The officials say it’s part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans.” The information was released in a joint...

The Department of Homeland Security will turn 1 year old March 1, but the past year has not been without challenges, one official said today. Janet Hale, homeland security undersecretary for management, told members of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association that the past year has been extraordinary and that standing up the department has been one of the "largest management challenges the federal government has ever seen." Hale was the keynote speaker for the opening day of AFCEA's 2004 Homeland Security Conference here. She said when the department was stood up in March 2003, some 180,000 employees had...

https://atlanta.afceachapters.org/2024-homeland-security-critical-infrastructure-conference “AFCEA Atlanta Homeland Security Conference on Critical Infrastructure November 6-7 , 2024 with a large-scale tabletop cybersecurity exercise on November 5, 2024 AFCEA Atlanta is proud to announce our Fourth Annual Homeland Security Conference is back for 2024! This will be a multi-day event focused on critical infrastructure, with a pre-conference cybersecurity exercise open to registrants who want to observe or participate.”

In December 2023, for 17 continuous days, a fleet of drones appeared at night over Langley Air Force Base (AFB), Virginia and other facilities in the greater Virginia Beach area. This was reported at the time, but the story was fleeting. Two other events occurred in the area that are relevant to the story. In February 2023, a pair of F-22s from Langley shot down the Chinese spy balloon as it exited the United States over South Carolina into the Atlantic Ocean. In January 2024, a Chinese graduate student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested for flying a drone...

The annual cost of cybercrime is expected to reach $10 trillion dollars next year. To put that figure into context, in terms of GDP it would be the third biggest economy in the world after the US and China. That’s why countries from Australia to China, the UK and US are racing to tighten up their cybersecurity laws – and why the UN is expected to pass a landmark cyber treaty in the next few weeks. For all the latest headlines follow our Google News channel online or via the app. From deep-fakes and disinformation to hacks and attacks on...

Donald Trump says a federal case needs to be brought against Kamala Harris after it was revealed Iran sent sensitive materials to her campaign about her rival... ...on Wednesday, the FBI claimed the cyber-terrorists sent unsolicited emails containing stolen information from the Trump campaign to people connected to the Democratic president in an effort to interfere. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, is now questioning why the Biden or Harris campaign did not turn over this information or report it to authorities... There's no evidence that any of the recipients of the hacked information responded, officials said, and...

Adrian Lamo, the computer hacker who reported Chelsea Manning to authorities for sharing classified documents with WikiLeaks, was found dead in an apartment in Wichita, Kansas, last week, according to local reports. Lamo, whose cause of death has yet to be reported but has been deemed unsuspicious by police, was 37, the Wichita Eagle reported. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and [acquaintances] that he is dead,” his father, Mario Lamo, posted on Facebook on Friday. “A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son.” Lamo...

Legacy media is reporting the FBI has allegedly located an individual of interest in over 100 swatting calls, including calls targeted at Alejandro Mayorkas, Director of the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure and Security Agency Jen Easterly, and other Biden administration officials. It is believed that the person of interest lives in Serbia. They have not yet been charged, but sources say charges will be brought soon. According to news reports, the suspect is alleged to have made the calls targeting officials over the Christmas holidays.

Personal information for some 3,191 congressional staffers has been leaked across the dark web, according to new research from internet security firm Proton being released Tuesday. The firm said the data available in the hidden online hubs includes passwords, IP addresses and information from social media platforms. “Many of these leaks likely occurred because staffers used their official email addresses to sign up for various services, including high-risk sites such as dating and adult websites, which were later compromised in data breaches,” Proton said in a statement. “This situation highlights a critical security lapse, where sensitive work-related emails became entangled...

The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as APT6, “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard. The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for...

Suppose, during a battle at sea— with missiles flying—an adversary is trying to disrupt a ship’s sensor- fusion system, so that it mischaracterizes what the sensors are seeing. With current cybersecurity methods, it could take minutes or even hours for analysts to determine that the system is being attacked. And by then it might be too late.However, a new approach that uses AI could, for example, send an alert to the combat systems officer—in real time—that there is a high probability that an attack on the sensor-fusion system is underway. Armed with that information, the CSO could limit any possible...

Shiva Ayyadurai is an entrepreneur, MIT graduate, Donald Trump-supporting Indian-born immigrant and U.S. citizen hoping that his outsider status will carry him to the U.S. Senate. A Republican, Ayyadurai declared on social media several weeks ago that he intends to challenge for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's seat in the 2018 election. He filed official paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on March 17. Warren, a Democrat, is a former Harvard Law School professor who defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown in the 2012 election. In a Monday meeting with editors of The Sun, Ayyadurai portrayed himself as a "21st-century senator" with...

A “possible cyberattack” led to an internet outage and web system issues at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Saturday, the Port of Seattle reported. The agency posted an initial alert on the social media platform X shortly after 9 a.m., advising passengers to check with their airlines for the latest information on their flights. In an afternoon update, the Port confirmed the possibility of a cyberattack and said it had “isolated critical systems.” The Port did not have a timeline for restoration.