Free Republic

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...

It all happened overnight and in a matter of minutes. Ben Zhou, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, made a series of routine transfers from his home computer. A short while later, his company called to inform him that his reserves of Ethereum, the second most-used cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, worth $1.5 billion, had vanished. By then, the ethers had already been transferred to thousands of other people’s digital wallets. Bybit had just suffered the largest theft in history. Five days later, the FBI confirmed what some analysts suspected from the outset: the attack was the work of Lazarus, a hacking...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day...

lon Musk revealed that the cyberattack which took down his social media app X on Monday seemingly originated in Ukraine. His bombshell revelation came during an interview with Fox Business Network on Monday afternoon following repeated glitches with his site, which has been down for much of the day. 'Well, we don't we're not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,' Musk said in the interview. Musk confirmed earlier in the day that X has been targeted by a 'massive...

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are targets of choice for online criminals, who often exploit weaknesses in major trading platforms or individual users’ digital “wallets” to make major scores. A recent $1.5-billion heist of Ethereum from the Bybit platform — attributed by the FBI to North Korean hackers — is believed to be the largest yet in an ever-longer litany of thefts. How common is crypto theft? Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain technology, which publicly records transactions between people holding and exchanging them. That has not kept a lid on theft, with an estimated $2.2 billion worth of the assets...

The Islamic Republic of Iran hacked former President Donald Trump’s campaign and turned over the stolen materials to the Biden-Harris campaign, federal officials said in a statement. Federal officials from ODNI, FBI, and CISA said in a joint statement that Iranian hackers sent the stolen materials to then-Biden-Harris campaign officials in June and July. Information that the hackers sent to the then-Biden-Harris campaign “contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails.” “This is further proof the Iranians are actively interfering in the election to help Kamala Harris and Joe Biden...

The Department of Homeland Security has dismissed the members of its advisory committees—including the Cyber Safety Review Board, which investigates major cybersecurity incidents—as part of a Trump-administration drive to cut costs at the agency, according to three people familiar with the matter. An internal Jan. 20 memo from DHS Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman said, “In alignment with the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security, I am directing the termination of all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS, effective immediately...Future committee activities will be focused...

BREAKING: TikTok has shut down in the U.S.

A hack and data breach at location data broker Gravy Analytics is threatening the privacy of millions of people around the world whose smartphone apps unwittingly revealed their location data collected by the data giant. The full scale of the data breach isn’t yet known, but the alleged hacker has already published a large sample of location data from top consumer phone apps — including fitness and health, dating, and transit apps, as well as popular games. The data represents tens of millions of location data points of where people have been, live, work, and travel between. News of the...

The FBI has unveiled details of a massive international cyberattack orchestrated by the Chinese hacker group Mustang Panda, which used the PlugX malware to compromise thousands of computers in at least 170 countries. According to the Justice Department, the group—described as “PRC state-sponsored hackers”—is funded by the Chinese government and has primarily targeted European government devices. Since 2014, Mustang Panda has utilized PlugX malware to infiltrate government and business systems across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The malware, initially designed to exploit Windows-based devices, was modified in 2020 to spread via USB flash drives. Thousands of devices, including many home...

Outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed during an interview on Sunday, a week before he steps down, that China has penetrated America’s water treatment plants, electric grid, and other critical civilian infrastructure, and is lying “in wait” for an opportunity to cyberattack at a time and place of its choosing. Asked on CBS’s 60 Minutes about Chinese penetration of U.S. cyber and infrastructure, Wray said China’s cyber program is the largest in the world and has stolen more of Americans’ personal and corporate data than every nation combined. Then, he added: But even beyond the cyber theft. There’s another part...

The Biden White House made a stunning admission that Chinese hackers have the ability to cripple the American power grid and ports, and it is reportedly not just run-of-the-mill intrusions but increasingly sophisticated actors with unparalleled skills. Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, had known about the Chinese hackers' ability to knock out critical infrastructure for more than a year, sources told The Wall Street Journal. In the fall of 2023 he had warned telecommunications and technology executives in a secret White House meeting, seeking Big Tech's help in protecting American lives and infrastructure from hacks. Since then there have been...

The US Treasury says Chinese hackers stole major documents in a computer breach. The hackers compromised third-party cybersecurity service provider BeyondTrust and were able to access unclassified documents, the letter said.

A major Russian telecommunications company appears to have begun providing an Internet connection to North Korea. The new link supplements one from China and will provide back-up to Pyongyang at a time the US government is reportedly attacking its Internet infrastructure and pressuring China to end all business with North Korea. The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening. Internet routing databases map the thousands of connections between telecom providers and enable computers to figure out the best route to a destination. Until now, Internet...

Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the US Treasury Department earlier this month and stole documents from its workstations, according to a letter to lawmakers that was provided to Reuters on Monday. The hackers compromised a third-party cybersecurity service provider and were able to access unclassified documents, the letter said, calling it a "major incident." According to the letter, hackers "gained access to a key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users. With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able override the service’s...

The story is about how older hackers from Russia in their 40's who have been hacking for years and know all the tricks unite with younger hackers, ENglish speaking, who are doing the hacking into corps. and elsewhere.

NEW YORK, July 13 (Reuters) - A former CIA software engineer was convicted on Wednesday of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks from the spy agency, in one of the biggest such thefts in CIA history.

NEW YORK (AP) - A former CIA software engineer charged with leaking government secrets to WikiLeaks says it’s cruel and unusual punishment that he’s awaiting trial in solitary confinement, housed in a vermin-infested cell of a jail unit where inmates are treated like “caged animals.” Joshua Schulte, 32, has asked a Manhattan federal judge to force the federal Bureau of Prisons to improve conditions at the Metropolitan Correction Center, where he has been held for over two years under highly restrictive conditions usually reserved for terrorism defendants. In court papers Tuesday, Schulte maintained he is held in conditions “below that...

A major cyberattack on big US telecom companies has led officials to recommend that people use encrypted messaging apps. Microsoft named the attack "Salt Typhoon," and it's affecting companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies. Officials haven't released a timeline for when everything will be fixed, but they did say that a lot of different types of information were accessed in the breach. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advised using encrypted messaging apps like Signal or iMessage to reduce the chances of messages being intercepted. This essentially means to stop using SMS because it's not...

A ransomware attack against blood-donation nonprofit OneBlood, which services more than 250 American hospitals, has "significantly reduced" the org's ability to take, test, and distribute blood. In a notice today, OneBlood revealed the intrusion disrupted a "software system," and had forced the organization to use manual processes and procedures to remain operational. The outfit provides blood for healthcare facilities across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. "Manual processes take significantly longer to perform and impact inventory availability," OneBlood spokesperson Susan Forbes explained in a statement. "In an effort to further manage the blood supply we have asked the more...