Free Republic

ISRAEL has accused Iran and Hezbollah of a twisted cyber attack where phones across the country were flooded with sick messages. One of the texts read "Say goodbye to your loved ones", while another said "Don't worry, you will hug them in hell". The Cyber Directorate said Israelis were sent three versions of the messages, all containing harmful links to unknown websites. The links were made inactive within a short period of time, the Directorate said. A statement from the army read: ..."Since this afternoon, the IAF has struck approximately 100 launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites, consisting of approximately...

“The Land the Law Forgot,” is what liberal legal scholar Jonathan Turley called New York in June. Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t have laws; it’s got so many, in fact, that studies found it to be our country’s least free state. It’s that N.Y.’s supposed law enforcers are ideological enforcers, using and going beyond the Empire State’s surfeit of strictures to build an empire of left-wing conformity. Letitia James’ Vendetta And now Letitia James, the notorious N.Y. attorney general who tag-teamed with a judge to try to pummel former President Donald Trump, has claimed another scalp: nonprofit anti-(destructive)immigration entity...

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.

Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine warPrivate Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfareTools support hacking operations and attacks on infrastructureDocuments linked to notorious Russian hacking group Sandworm...Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations... The software engineers behind these systems are employees of NTC Vulkan. On the surface, it looks like a run-of-the-mill cybersecurity consultancy. However, a leak of secret files from the company has exposed its work bolstering Vladimir Putin’s cyberwarfare capabilities.

Chris Krebs has stated in the past and testified yesterday that there was no voter fraud through “hacking” that occurred during the 2020 election. For complete transparency, I did not watch his testimony nor have a read a transcript. Why would I? This is the same guy who didn’t notice the largest cyber-attack in world history happening against multiple federal agencies for months.Krebs was fired last month from his position as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The agency is tasked with preventing the exact type of massive cyberattack that has been underway since March, perhaps earlier....

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

National security adviser John Bolton defended his decision to eliminate a cybersecurity coordinator position at the White House, saying he "fixed" an overstaffing issue and that, "You know, the whole thing works." “I inherited a structure in the national security staff that was duplicative and overlapping," Bolton told reporters in a briefing Thursday. Bolton, who took office in April, said cutting the job in May did not negatively impact the National Security Council's ability to craft cybersecurity policy and respond to threats.

Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson is more concerned about a cyberattack crippling the government than another Jan. 6-type assault on the Capitol, she said in an interview aired Saturday on CNN. “Our networks ... have attempted intrusions every single day. And so, cybersecurity for me is a much greater concern than the prospect of thousands of people storming the West Terrace,” Gibson said. Gibson’s comments come in wake of several significant cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, including a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline that crippled East Coast fuel supply last month and another on a major U.S. meat...

Today we saw some important testimony in the Michael Sussmann case. First, Rodney Joffe, an FBI confidential human source, went around his FBI handler to relay dubious Alfa Bank information to a friend at the FBI. Second, there were indications that Joffe previously worked on Russia cyber security matters. This leads us to ask whether Joffe was in some way involved in the Trump/Russia investigation. More on that below. The testimony of retired FBI Agent Tom Grasso. Grasso, a witness for Sussmann, was a Special Agent with the FBI whose “primary responsibility involved investigating cyber crimes.” He was part of...

"The maritime industry transports 90% of the world’s trade and cyberattacks on shipping increased 900% between 2017 and 2020, to the tune of one incident on a ship every day. How much of your supply chain runs across the ocean?" "“The disruption of ships, ports, communications and shipping lanes is a genuine threat. This is crippling to the larger economy/larger supply chains—especially with things stretched thin today,” says Steve Moore, chief security strategist at Exabeam. “Amazon is even building its fleet with its own technology to control these problems more effectively.”"

The nation’s leading expert on protecting the electric grid from attack urges governors to take the lead because the Biden administration won’t. In a new alert, Peter Vincent Pry, the executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, said concerns are growing that Russia, North Korea, and Iran are inching closer to testing an electromagnetic attack on the U.S. grid, or parts of it. He noted the current crisis in Ukraine could spark a Russian attack, and he cited state media making the threat in the past. “In April 2021, during the previous big crisis between...

Even in death, the John McAfee saga grows stranger. More than seven months after he died in a Spanish jail, McAfee’s body remains in a prison morgue freezer somewhere in or near Barcelona. His daughter and ex-wife waged a legal fight over the body and a Spanish judge is continuing to conduct an investigation over the cause of his death. At the same time, the first of what is expected to be several attempts to detail the hard-to-believe exploits of the antivirus-software pioneer has arrived, a book whose contents are vigorously denied by McAfee’s family. It is unclear to those...

Navy cyber is a ship without a rudder. While every other service has one cyber designator, the Navy’s cyber expertise resides in three seprate communities. As a result, the three communities are each plagued with unnecessary problems and none are fully empowered or capable of leading the domain. To solve this issue, the Navy must consolidate responsibility for cyber, invest in the cyber warfare engineer community, and require deep technical experience for all cyber roles.Leadership and management for Navy cyber is currently divided among cryptologic warfare officers (CWOs), information professionals (IPs), and cyber warfare engineers (CWEs). CWOs are ostensibly responsible...

Today, the Justice Department unsealed charges in a significant national security cyber matter.  The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Washington (EDWA) and the National Security Division (NSD) have charged two Chinese hackers working with the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), including the Guangdong State Security Department (GSSD) of the MSS, with a sweeping global computer intrusion campaign.  In making this announcement, I’m joined here by Dave Bowdich, Deputy Director of the FBI, Bill Hyslop, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, and Raymond Duda, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Seattle Field...

New York (CNN Business)This year hackers have unleashed cyberattacks against pipelines, ferry boats, meat packers, even police departments. And now they've come for the cream cheese. In October, a cyberattack against the largest US cheese manufacturer contributed to a nationwide cream cheese shortage shortly before the holidays, Bloomberg News reported, endangering holiday treats for millions. Bloomberg reported the attack targeted plants and distribution centers. As a result, Wisconsin-based Schreiber Foods was unable to fully operate for several days — just as it was heading into its peak busy period before the Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas holidays.....

A global conflict between the great powers of the world is already "in full swing,” according to a senior Russian diplomat, and it's happening in cyberspace. "The war [in cyberspace] is underway and unfolding very intensively,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s international information security director, Alexander Krutskikh, told a political science conference on Thursday. “The media rightly says that this [is] a Third World War, and what matters now is to calculate the damage and determine who will lose it in the end and what shape the world will eventually acquire as a result of this war.”... ...“No matter how hard...

The UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s Operating in the Future Electromagnetic Environment (OFEME) symposium on 23rd/24th November gave a tantalising glimpse into Russian cyber warfare. The event, held in London and online, included a presentation by Duncan McCrory. Mr. McCrory, an engineer and PhD candidate at London’s Kings College, highlighted the use of a Russian cyberattack tool called X-Agent. This was part of his wider presentation on Russian cyber and electronic warfare, and information operations. Mr. McCrory said that X-Agent was malware used to infect computers with the Android operating system used by Ukrainian Army artillery. He cited evidence...

"This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements." The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed. Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management...

My friend suggested an imaginative use of letters of marque and reprisal, as authorized by the Constitution. These were the basis of privateering, perhaps the ultimate in privatization. The government would authorize the captain of a civilian vessel to seize enemy shipping, and sell it for his own profit. The letters ensured that if he was captured, he would be treated as a POW rather than as a pirate. A factor in ending the War of 1812 was that, while the US Navy was far too small to have an impact, American privateers (far outnumbering the Royal Navy) were inflicting...

Incarcerated computer legend John McAfee says he’s stunned by the price of Dogecoin. Speaking from behind bars in a Spanish jail after being banged up on charges of cryptocurrency fraud and tax evasion, the 75-year-old was apparently shocked to hear the crypto hailed by Elon Musk and Snoop Dogg was now changing hands for as much as 30 cents a unit. “There are a few inmates that speak English well enough for John to have conversations with so that has helped him to not feel so isolated,” she said. McAfee hinted earlier this year that it was his involvement with...