Free Republic

Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.

(Reuters) - The annual Def Con hacking convention has asked the federal government to stay away this year for the first time in its 21-year history, saying Edward Snowden's revelations have made some in the community uncomfortable about having feds there. ... Last year, four-star General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, was a keynote speaker at the event, which is the world's largest annual hacking conference. The audience was respectful, gave modest applause and also asked about secret government snooping. Alexander adamantly denied that the NSA has dossiers on millions of Americans, as some former employees had...

Max Kelly left his post as Chief Security Officer at Facebook for the NSA in 2010, after having worked with the agency when Facebook joined Prism in 2010 The NSA is increasing recruiting from Silicon Valley and investing in start-ups Facebook recently revealed the NSA made between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for information in the latter half of 2012 It's unclear whether Kelly is directly involved in the NSA's Prism program In a strange reversal, the man who used to be responsible for keeping our Facebook information private and secure is now working for the National Security Agency, the government...

Journalist Michael Hastings was killed early Tuesday morning in a bizarre car incident in Los Angeles. Hastings, 33, was best known for writing the Rolling Stone story that ended in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resignation as head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Hastings’ final story, “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” was a searing take on the NSA snooping scandal, which Hastings described as “North Korea-esque.” Hastings pulled no punches as he linked the NSA scandal to the Department of Justice’s spying on reporters and the IRS abuse scandal. Hastings built a case that the same Democrats who turned Bush-era...

Summary: We know that there's no such thing as a completely secure computer system. Is the NSA the nation's largest security risk of them all? Many are concerned about the National Security Agency (NSA) collection of data on US companies and individuals and the very real possibility that it has a way of directly accessing the servers of the world's largest computing platforms: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. It's certainly a situation that deserves attention and concern. But what's missing in this discussion is this: how secure is the NSA's spying system? If a foreign entity wanted to spy on US...

Hegemony: Chinese President Xi Jinping begins an Americas tour as tensions rise in Asia, Chinese hackers steal our secrets and the administration invites Beijing's growing navy to participate in exercises off Hawaii. Xi Jinping arrived Friday for a two-day summit with President Obama as part of a swing that included stops in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago — a sign of China's rising influence in our backyard and its growth beyond being a regional Asian power. Beijing has quietly responded to our "pivot" to the Pacific by strengthening military, economic and diplomatic ties in our hemisphere while its...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, according to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper.</p> <p>The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.</p>

A new study led by Dennis Blair, who served as President Barack Obama’s first director of national intelligence, and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who served as U.S. ambassador to China from 2009 through 2011 found that the US loses billions in intellectual property to Chinese hackers every year. The report found that an estimated 2.1 million American jobs were lost due to intellectual theft. The report recommends corporations hire what amount to full-time IT security guards who patrol their networks — assisted by automated systems that scan for software behaving strangely, a telltale sign of malware — looking for...

Cyberwar: Chinese hackers have obtained the designs for more than two dozen major U.S. weapon systems, including the Navy's missile defense system and our latest fighter. Our very national survival may soon be at risk. When President Barack Obama meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time on June 7-8 in California, we hope he will not bow but rather demand the Chinese stop their cyberwar against the U.S. that has reaped for them the designs for more than two dozen major weapon systems used by the U.S. military. According to a previously undisclosed section of a confidential...

SNIPPET: "U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports said the websites of Ansar al-Mujahidin, Shumukh al-Islam and Al Fida — all accredited as official outlets of the terrorist group once led by Osama bin Laden — were knocked off the Internet by cyberattacks in early May. Two of the sites — Ansar al-Mujahidin (as-ansar.com) and Shumukh al-Islam (shamikh1.info) — came back up Monday and Tuesday. The site Al Fida remains down." SNIPPET: "The disruptions are prompting many jihadists to shift from Web forums to Twitter for communications and propaganda messaging."

It was a brazen bank heist, but a 21st-century version in which the criminals never wore ski masks, threatened a teller or set foot in a vault. In two precision operations that involved people in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with surgical precision, thieves stole $45 million from thousands of A.T.M.'s in a matter of hours. In New York City alone, the thieves responsible for A.T.M. withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. The operation included sophisticated computer experts operating in the shadowy world of Internet hacking, manipulating...

A worldwide gang of criminals stole $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, federal prosecutors said Thursday — and outmoded U.S. card technology may be partly to blame. Seven people are under arrest in the U.S. in connection with the case, which prosecutors said involved thousands of thefts from ATMs using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks. The fraudsters moved with astounding speed to loot financial institutions around the world, working in cells including one in...

For the first time the Obama administration has explicitly accused China’s military of hacking into computer systems of the U.S. government and its defense contractors. "The accusations relayed in the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities were remarkable in their directness," writes David Sanger of The New York Times.

It would appear that Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill. It would appear that Rogers' wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed. It's somewhat amazing that no one has really covered this part of the story, but it highlights, yet again, the kind of activities by folks in Congress that make the public trust Congress less and less. It has...

The US stock market went into a temporary tailspin after hackers broke into the Twitter account of the Associated Press and announced that two bombs had exploded at the White House, injuring Barack Obama. “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,” said the fake “alert” from one of America’s most trusted news sources, briefly fooling some news outlets and sending the Dow Jones plunging 145 points in the space of two minutes — or 1 per cent. The benchmark S&P 500 index also fell nearly 1 percent in the space of three minutes as the...

Republicans have been so busy attacking each other lately that little attention is being paid to the antics of the left. The far left activists, including the Occupy movement and Anonymous, have been quite busy. The Occupiers are helping fast food workers strike for higher wages and a union. Their targets include Wendy's and Burger King in New York City. If they really wanted to help those workers, they would encourage them to attend college and find higher paying jobs. The founder of the Occupy movement, Adbusters, is organizing Occupiers to protest Goldman Sachs banks around the world. They would...

Terror group Hamas was quoted Saturday as saying that members of the hacking group Anonymous broke into a Mossad website and revealed the names of 123 Israeli spies. According to a report in Egyptian newspaper Al Shaab al Masri, the claim was made by an officer for the "internal security intelligence" mechanism in the interior ministry of the Hamas government of Gaza. The officer said that 48 of the spies work in Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's stock exchanges. Another 52 work in the EMPC building, where Egypt's central television studios are located, 15 work on oil rigs in the Persian...

This has not been a very good cyber war for Anonymous hackers against the Jews of Israel. As we reported earlier, their own site was humiliatingly hacked just hours after declaring their cyber war, dubbed #OpIsrael. Now, the apparently not so Anonymous hacktivists have been arrested in Jordan. Weasel Zippers has the story. Jordanian security forces arrested several youths who are suspected of attacking Israeli internet sites as part of the large scale cyber attack on Israel declared by the group called Anonymous. This has really upset the hacker community, who is now threatening to attack Jordan. They’ve also declared...

Hackers Bust N.Korean Propaganda Site International hacker group Anonymous on Thursday broke into Uriminzokkiri, a North Korean website that spreads propaganda from North Korea's official KCNA news agency. The hacker collective released the personal information of the website's 9,001 subscribers, including their ID and password, name, date of birth and other details. The South Korean National Intelligence Service said, "Many of the leaked details on the website match those of South Koreans." Police are taking a keen interest. A National Police Agency spokesman said, "A considerable number of people who want to access information about North Korea are registered on...

A group of international hackers, dubbed “Hackers Anonymous,” has vowed to “erase Israel from the Internet” in a coordinated attack against the Jewish state scheduled to take place on April 7. The campaign, titled #OpIsrael, was initiated and announced by a hacker who goes by the name of Anon Ghost, the Arabian Gazette reported Wednesday. It is being supported by a number of other known hacktivists who have gained notoriety for carrying out similar state-targeted attacks. “Israel isn't stopping human rights violations. It’s to show solidarity with newly recognized Palestinian state,” one hacking team told The Hackers Post website, providing...