Free Republic

The head of Iran’s cyber warfare program has been shot dead, triggering further accusations that outside powers are carrying out targeted assassinations of key figures in the country’s security apparatus, reports the Telegraph. Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of Iran’s Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, northwest of the capital Tehran. Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile program have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations. Ahmadi was last seen leaving his...

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements. When Special Counsel John Durham charged former...

This afternoon, President Donald Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum that instructs the Department of Justice and “other aspects of [his] government” to investigate Chris Krebs and his acts as the former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). At the signing, President Trump’s White House staff secretary Will Scharf stated: “This is a man who weaponized his position against free speech in the election context and the context of COVID-19. This is a similar Presidential Memorandum to the one you just signed. It addresses his access to government existent clearances he might have and further instructs your Department...

The rise of artificial intelligence should have marked a new frontier in innovation, productivity, and security. Instead, it’s beginning to look more like the opening act of a high-tech cautionary tale. As AI advances in sophistication, it’s not ushering in utopia. It’s opening the floodgates to a new kind of threat -- one that uses data, mimicry, and digital misdirection to exploit our oldest and most reliable vulnerability: ourselves. A recent report reveals how AI is now at the center of a technological arms race in cyberspace. Deepfake technology has reached the point where criminals can manufacture photorealistic video messages...

An IT specialist employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was arrested today for attempting to transmit national defense information to an officer or agent of a foreign government. Nathan Vilas Laatsch, 28, of Alexandria, was arrested in northern Virginia and will make his initial court appearance tomorrow. According to court documents, Laatsch became a civilian employee of the DIA in 2019, where he works with the Insider Threat Division and holds a Top Secret security clearance. In March, the FBI commenced an operation after receiving a tip that an individual - now known to be Laatsch - offered to...

Google is making an important change to Chrome on Windows. The browser will no longer run with administrator privileges by default. This change is designed with the intent to protect users from potentially malicious threats. As Bleeping Computer explains, when Chrome runs with administrator rights, any file that you download can pose a security risk. What that means is a malicious file that a user downloads could run with full system access, and in turn jeopardize the operating system. Microsoft Edge has a feature which was introduced in 2019 that prevents it from launching with elevated privileges. Edge displays a...

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, the country’s military intelligence service. Some of the...

News AnalysisAmericans and allies are too dependent on China tech, as demonstrated by recent revelations that our Chinese-manufactured credit card machines are sending data back to China for no good reason.The U.S. Treasury Department says that millions of Chinese point-of-sale (POS) devices, the credit card machines found at check-out counters, could be sending customer data back to China for no good reason.Treasury Department lab tests show that the data is encrypted and sent to unknown third parties in China. The transmissions are “superfluous to normal payment transaction processing,” according to a letter from the Treasury’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical...

On Thursday, CIA Chief William Burns gave his first public speech as director at the Georgia Institute of Technology addressing the dual threat of China and Russia. Burns said Chinese President Xi Jinping is “a silent partner” in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “aggression” in Ukraine, warning that China poses the “greatest challenge” and “most profound test” that the agency has ever faced. KX News has covered the State Investment Board’s efforts to entirely divest from Russia, but what about Russia’s “silent partner,” China? The SIB has 69 investments in China that span a wide range of industries throughout the country....

A recent investigation reveals that PAX Global Technology, a Chinese company under federal investigation for suspicious data transmissions, has ownership links to Che Feng, a Chinese financier closely connected to Hunter Biden. Earlier this month, Hunter Biden dropped his lawsuit against two IRS whistleblowers who alleged there had been a cover-up in former President Biden’s DOJ to block a tax fraud investigation into the former President’s son. However, the financial sector controversies Hunter has incited, particularly with his business dealings in China, remain an ongoing topic of interest and allegedly extend far deeper than tax fraud. For example, Breitbart News...

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...