Free Republic

Multiple news websites, including The New York Times, The Financial Times and CNN, were temporarily shut down during a massive outage early Tuesday. BBC, Bloomberg News, The Guardian and The Financial Times, Reddit, Pinterest and Twitch were also affected by the outage.

The Colonial Pipeline is reportedly facing more issues. A Reuters reporter wrote the company is "experiencing network issues impacting customers' ability to enter and update nominations." "Our internal IT department is aware of the issue and working to resolve as quickly as possible," Reuters' Devika Krishna Kumar quoted the company as saying on her Twitter account on Friday. Colonial also reported said communication from its systems to Transport4 may also be affected. Transport4 is a business utility used by the pipeline industry to enter, manage and track shipments. Colonial is the largest pipeline system for refined oil products in the...

Has anyone seen anything about Caucus Room site being "hijacked"? I have an e-mail from the last half hour which really just looks like an ad for Caucusroom, but the subject line is "CaucusRoom hijacked". e-mail addy looks legit.

DarkSide, the hacker group behind the Colonial ransomware attack, received $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments, according to blockchain sleuths Elliptic. The cybercriminal gang shut down last week after losing access to its servers and as its cryptocurrency wallets were emptied. Elliptic said DarkSide's bitcoin wallet contained $5.3 million worth of the digital currency before its funds were drained.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, acknowledged Sunday that gun violence in the US is a public health emergency. 'Myself, as a public health person, I think you can't run away from that. When you see people getting killed, in this last month it's just been horrifying what's happened. How can you say that's not a public health issue?' he told CNN's Dana Bash on 'State of the Union' when asked if gun violence was a public health emergency.

"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...

I don't think we can post content from Ars Technica. Needless to say, Gab was hacked pretty hard over the weekend.Change your passwords at a very minimum. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/gab-the-far-right-website-has-been-hacked-and-70gb-of-data-leaked/

Judge Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s nominee for U.S. Attorney General, declined to say on Monday whether he would retain Special Counsel John Durham in his role investigating the origins of the “Russia collusion” investigation. Former Attorney General William Barr quietly elevated Durham to Special Counsel last fall, before the presidential election, to preserve his work in a potential new administration. Barr had previously said that he believed there may have been improper political motivations behind the FBI’s launch of Operation Hurricane Crossfire into Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. One FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to misleading the FISA...

U.S. law enforcement officials are investigating a hacker’s unsuccessful attempt to tamper with a Florida city’s water supply, an event that cybersecurity professionals view as yet another wake-up call that should cause the government to examine its role in protecting critical infrastructure from more skillful attackers. On Monday, local officials from the city of Oldsmar and the surrounding Pinellas county said a “bad actor” used software that provides remote access to a public water treatment facility to increase the level of sodium hydroxide—the main ingredient in drain cleaners, which is used in small quantities to adjust pH levels—to a dangerous...

This is so bad that I could probably present the quotes in this article without comment. The Washington Post’s top “fact-checker” decided to get into a back and forth with Stephen Miller (the other one) today. It did not go well for the former. The topic of conversation was the fact that the Post is being very selective in what they even bother fact-checking when it comes to Biden, specifically on his pledge to not ban fracking during the campaign. Glenn Kessler chimes in to let it be known that they only fact-check “policy” and not general statements. That’s a...

A member of the Legal Insurrection website commentary, who goes by the name "checklight" - reports (the following is the complete comment): 2600’s Hacker Quarterly Facebook page claims Parler has been hacked. Very briefly, critical details of its security and account verification tools were leaked in an email, and were used to establish “millions” of faux-admin accounts. Those accounts exploited the fact that posts to Parler are never deleted, just MARKED as deleted. (That old wheeze? Again? Did we learn nothing from DOS?) Deleted posts and their contents, even those created as private, were then revealed. And the kicker.. is...

At link. Seems to be a massive doxxing effort is underway. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/kuqvs3/all_parler_user_data_is_being_downloaded_as_we/

It appears the group Anonymous and their Antifa affiliates hacked ten years’ worth of data from fusion centers and police departments across the United States. The groups claim hundreds of thousands of law enforcement sensitive bulletins are in their hands. Under the code name #BlueLeaks, the group, commonly known as Anonymous and their self-claimed antifascist affiliates like Distributed Denial of Secrets known online as DDoSecrets leaked sensitive law enforcement data from federal, state and local law enforcement databases...

UPDATED: The seized domain has been turned into a killswitch to prevent the SolarWinds hackers to escalate infections and make new victims. Microsoft and a coalition of tech companies have intervened today to seize and sinkhole a domain that played a central role in the SolarWinds hack, ZDNet has learned from sources familiar with the matter. The domain in question is avsvmcloud[.]com, which served as command and control (C&C) server for malware delivered to around 18,000 SolarWinds customers via a trojanized update for the company's Orion app. SolarWinds Orion updates versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June...

On Friday, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) reacted to the alleged hacks orchestrated by Russia on multiple U.S. federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. Kaine argued during MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that the alleged cyberattack shows we cannot count on the President Donald Trump administration to keep Americans safe. However, he touted President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming national security team as “competent” enough to do so.

Is there a major bombshell about to drop the demonstrates a reason to not trust Joe Biden and his team? Does this have something to do with the massive hacks ongoing across the federal government right now? Or is it just an awkward holiday protocol? So many questions. ===================================================================== Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with former Vice President Joe Biden’s transition team. This stunning news could mean many things and speculation is already running wild. Axios reported this morning that the move caught the Biden team by surprise. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense...

This is a 2-year-old educational video from Symantec that I found on YouTube 12/6/2020. It shows how easy it would be to hack a voting machine. The media and Dems keep saying vote stealing couldn't happen. Well this video from Symantec, the long-time cyber security leader, shows it can.This is Symantec's own statement about the video: "To demonstrate how vulnerable some of our digital election infrastructure really is, we bought two voting machines from an online auction site for less than $200. They were last used in State and Federal elections in 2012 and 2013. What vulnerabilities will we find?...

The distribution of Biden votes were not random enough, They were created by algorithm. The analysis is lengthy; the conclusions are very clear. A must see. Take the time to view this video. FaceBook has flagged this video as false. Its not. MUST SEE !

Marriott International said early Friday that data on roughly 500 million customers staying at Starwood hotel properties had been compromised in a breach that gave unknown attackers access to the Starwood network since 2014. The company said it has not finished identifying duplicate information in the database, but believes it contains information on up to approximately 500 million guests who made a reservation at a Starwood property. The hotel giant said that on September 8, 2018, it received an alert from an internal security tool regarding an attempt to access the Starwood guest reservation database. The company said it “quickly...

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos predicted Tuesday that Democrats were going to perform well in “ruby red” districts this year. “I think we are going to see some wins in these deep red districts that over time you’re going to see going from ruby red to purple to even blue,” Ms. Bustos, Illinois Democrat, told reporters on an Election Day press call. ... Overall, Republicans have 17 seats considered a toss-up while Democrats only have nine and are likely to grow their majority by 10 to 15 seats, according to an analysis from the Cook Political Report. ....