Free Republic

The past few weeks have been hardly an easy time for Facebook.Frances Haugen’s leak, combined with a six-hour blackout last week, has reinforced some politicians’ desire to further regulate Facebook, or even completely break it up, as proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. However, while the EU and U.S. are thinking long and hard about their next move against big tech, China has been taking over our digital space in the West slowly but consistently. Following a report by an anonymous researcher, Hikvision, a Chinese surveillance company, is now facing scrutiny over a privacy breach in Europe. The high-tech cameras produced by...

US lawmakers have recently begun discussing the need for a federal plan to find out what types of cash payments are made after ransomware attacks. Cyberattacks have been ramping up in recent months, with each one underscoring the nation’s under-preparedness. The digital infrastructure of private companies and government organizations have plenty of vulnerabilities, and their responses to damaging attacks have been frantically improvised. Worsening the situation are the significant delays in responding to cyberattacks, an inevitable consequence of the fact that the federal government has no uniform approach to combating malicious hackers. In May 2021, $4.4 million in Bitcoin was...

ISIS is hoping to carry out major attacks on the West that could wreak major havoc—and they could do it from anywhere in the world. Islamic State militants are planning the creation of a 'cyber caliphate' protected by their own encryption software - from behind which they will launch massive hacking attacks on the U.S. and the West. Both Islamic State and Al Qaeda claim to be actively recruiting skilled hackers in a bid to create a team of jihadist computer experts capable of causing devastating cyber disruptions to Western institutions. […] Large numbers of Islamic State fighters are young,...

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...