Free Republic

What just happened? The US Department of Justice on Monday announced it has indicted four members of the Chinese military with hacking into the computer systems of credit monitoring firm Equifax in 2017 and stealing the personally identifiable information of nearly 150 million Americans. The government alleges that Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei were members of the People’s Liberation Army Research Institute, a branch of the Chinese military, and conspired to hack into Equifax’s networks, maintain access to the computers and steal sensitive information. Specifically, the indictment claims the defendants exploited a vulnerability in the Apache...

SurveyUSA has a new national poll that shows Joe Biden leading with 32 percent of the vote, followed by Bernie Sanders at 21 percent, Elizabeth Warren at 14 percent and both Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg at 9 percent. As compared with SurveyUSA’s previous national poll in November, Biden is up 2 percentage points, Sanders is up 4, Warren is down 1, Buttigieg is down 2, and Bloomberg is up 6. While SurveyUSA has seemingly good news for Biden, an Ipsos national poll for Reuters does not. Instead, it has Sanders ahead nationally at 20 percent, followed by Biden at...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's defense failed him at the opening of his Senate impeachment trial on Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had one job. He just had to collect 51 votes for the trial rules he had written, in close consultation with White House officials, to deliver Trump an acquittal quickly, quietly and with as few surprises as possible. He couldn't do it. Fellow Republicans balked at his plan so late in the game — moments before the start of the trial — that he had to order up handwritten changes sought by Democrats just to secure...

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - Two of the first three states to vote in the Democratic presidential race will use new mobile apps to gather results from thousands of caucus sites - technology intended to make counting easier but that raises concerns of hacking or glitches. Democratic Party activists in Iowa and Nevada will use programs downloaded to their personal phones to report the results of caucus gatherings to the state headquarters. That data will then be used to announce the unofficial winners. Paper records will later be used to certify the results. The party is moving ahead with the...

The Inspector General of Social Security, Gail S. Ennis, is warning the public that telephone scammers may send faked documents by email to convince victims to comply with their demands. The Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has received reports of victims who received emails with attached letters and reports that appeared to be from Social Security or Social Security OIG. The letters may use official letterhead and government “jargon” to convince victims they are legitimate; they may also contain misspellings and grammar mistakes. This is the latest variation on Social Security phone scams, which continue to...

Convenience store chain Wawa announced a massive data breach that potentially compromised "customer payment card information" at all Wawa locations for approximately nine months. The data breach could impact debit and credit card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names, Wawa announced Thursday. PIN numbers, CVV2 numbers (the three or four digit security codes on most credit cards) and driver's license information were not impacted, the company said. The company said it discovered the malware in Wawa payment processing servers on Dec. 10 and had the issue contained two days later, but that the malware may have been running since March...

Those laser pointer lights could hack into your smart home voice assistant. University researchers say they were able to hack Alexa, Google Home, Siri and Facebook Portal by shining lasers at them. The light can trick microphones and make the devices react as if they are receiving audio. The study found light commands can be sent from 360 feet away, from one building to another. The light can also penetrate glass, affecting a device that is left near a window. In one case, a garage door was opened using a laser light. Researchers also say they can use light commands...

Meta alert! Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign was hindered by the hacking and dissemination of Democratic National Committee emails, will host a Q&A with the directors and one of the subjects of the new documentary The Great Hack following a Nov. 1 screening in New York for Academy members, media elite and other tastemakers, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer's film, which premiered at Sundance back in January and began streaming on Netflix on July 24, explores the shady operations of the U.K.-based data company Cambridge Analytica during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election...

No wonder the Dems are nervous: The alleged Russian hacking of the DNC’s computers is proving to be a Hillary campaign and DNC scam that went unchallenged by Messrs. Comey and Mueller. n his telephone conversation with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump requested Ukraine’s help in getting “to the bottom of” the Russian collusion narrative and the role of CrowdStrike, a private computer security company, in propagating that story. Lost in the volcanic eruption of faux outrage and condemnation aimed at the president by the Democrats and their wholly owned media subsidiary, this reference to CrowdStrike indicates that the...

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., called for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., to be removed from his role on the panel after it was revealed Schiff's office had contact with the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower. "It goes to the fact that his own staff ... and Schiff himself are fact witnesses," McCarthy said on "Hannity." "Nowhere in the American judicial system does it ever allow a fact witness to ever be the prosecutor." McCarthy added, "He should be removed from the committee. His staff should be removed but now they're trying to control it." Schiff's office acknowledged Wednesday that...

Donald Trump didn’t learn anything from 2016. Not only has he still not acknowledged Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. Not only has he still not admitted his campaign’s multiple contacts with Russian operatives. Not only does he disagree with fellow Republicans who say: “We can’t allow foreign interference in an American election ever again.” Trump welcomed foreign influence in 2016 and now he’s doing his best to make it happen again, in 2020. This time with a different country. Not Russia, but Ukraine. There’s a lot we still don’t know, but we know enough to be alarmed. Here’s...

Video – Alyssa Milano in Tears: ‘We Are Destroying Children’s Lives’ over ‘Arbitrary Lines in the Sand’ A sobbing Alyssa Milano shared a video with her 3.6 million Twitter followers in which she referred to the United States’ southern border as “arbitrary lines in the sand” and accused border patrol agents of “destroying children’s lives” by enforcing America’s immigration laws. “I just watched this video of a baby being reunited with her mom,” said Milano, as she sobbed in front of the camera. “What the f#@% are we doing? We are destroying lives. We are destroying children’s lives because of...

FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary regarding the committee’s oversight of the agency. (you can start from the beginning)

"omg." That was the three-letter response from top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin -- familiar Internet shorthand for "Oh my God!" -- when Justin Cooper, the technology pro overseeing Clinton's private home-based email servers, told her shortly after midnight on Jan. 9, 2011, that "someone was trying to hack us." The revelation was contained in a trove of newly released, partially redacted FBI documents from the agency's investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information -- a probe known as the "Midyear Exam." The document release reveals numerous episodes in which the Clinton team either suspected it had been hacked or...

Read: White House Counsel Emmett Flood's letter to Attorney General Barr on Mueller report"!!

WHY THE DNC WAS NOT HACKED BY THE RUSSIANS The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 26, 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged “hack” no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet “intrusion”. The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation–the files taken from the DNC on between 23 and 25 May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage...

Easily swapped hashed passwords gives Domain Admin rights via API call. Fix may land next month Microsoft Exchange appears to be currently vulnerable to a privilege escalation attack that allows any user with a mailbox to become a Domain Admin.On Thursday, Dirk-jan Mollema, a security researcher with Fox-IT in the Netherlands, published proof-of-concept code and an explanation of the attack, which involves the interplay of three separate issues.According to Mollema, the primary problem is that Exchange has high privileges by default in the Active Directory domain."The Exchange Windows Permissions group has WriteDacl access on the Domain object in Active Directory,...

Despite all the convenience and quality of Google's sprawling ecosystem, some users are fed up with the fishy privacy policies the company has recently Since Google owns some of the best and most-used apps, websites, and internet services, making a clean break is difficult -- but not impossible. We're going to take a look at how to leave the most popular Google services behind, and how to keep Google from tracking your data. We've also spent serious time researching and testing great alternatives to Google's offerings, so you can leave the Big G without having to buy new devices or...

While I don't support or encourage hacking, this event was rather memorable and amusing. Someone hacked democraticunderground.com on election day 2016. This caused countless automated posts that read simply "God Emperor: Trump is god emperor and he will win." Also, visitors to the site were treated to a patriotic, pro-Trump video.

Social networking giant Facebook Inc. clarified that hackers accessed personal information of accounts of almost 30 million users. Earlier, Facebook had said that a security breach had affected the accounts of as many as 50 million people. In a statement, Facebook said that hackers accessed the name, contact details and other information of the accounts of 14 million people. It added that hackers also stole information in regard to name and contact details of the accounts of another 15 million people. This also included username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access...