Free Republic

Sean Brian Townsend is an independent researcher in the field of information and computer security, a member and the spokesman of the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance. He explains how Kaspersky Lab and the FSB hacked and leaked the secret NSA tools under the guise of The Shadow Brokers hacker group. These leaks became the origin of WannaCry, NotPetya, and BadRabbit ransomware attacks. The editors of InformNapalm may not share the opinions of the authors in the [opinion] section, and does not alter the original style of the articles. Antivirus software – myths and reality The activities of antivirus (AV) companies are...

The FBI failed to notify scores of U.S. officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year that the targets were in the Kremlin's crosshairs, The Associated Press has found. Nearly 80 interviews with Americans targeted by Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, turned up only two cases in which the FBI had provided a heads-up. Even senior policymakers discovered they were targets only when the AP told them, a situation some described as bizarre and dispiriting. "It's utterly confounding," said Philip Reiner, a former senior director...

This week Uber fired its chief security officer and one of his deputies. The reason? They had concealed a massive security breach for more than one year. And that's not all: in order to convince the hackers to delete the information on 57 million people, the security officers paid the hackers $100,000. "At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers to delete the...

The American grid security story grows increasingly grim. Last week, security consulting firm Symantec warned that recent cyberattacks gave hackers direct access to the nation’s power grid on multiple occasions, according to a new report by Wired. This time, not only the United States was exposed, said Symantec. Europe also experienced similar vulnerabilities, proving the hackers could have induced blackouts on both sides of the Atlantic. Thankfully, this apocalyptic scenario didn’t happen. In spring and summer 2017, the Dragonfly 2.0 hacker group—a primary culprit featured in cybersecurity reports from many experts lately—launched campaigns against energy companies. They succeeded 20 times,...

Humanity has a massive password problem. We might call it The Password Pandemic. Computers keep getting faster and cheaper, making passwords easier to crack, while human operators do not change their bad password habits. This is a losing proposition, with the advantage clearly toward hackers and cyber criminals. Most users of the Internet now know that they need to use “strong” passwords, and that they should use a different password for each site. With a dozen or several dozen online accounts, this quickly becomes unmanageable. Exasperated, people just use the same (usually weak) password across several accounts. Hackers know this,...

U.S. Senate investigators sought and received materials from the estate of Peter W. Smith, a longtime Republican operative who reportedly acknowledged shortly before his death that he spearheaded an effort to obtain missing Hillary Clinton emails from Russian hackers, two sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. Smith, a private-equity executive from Chicago who had been active in Republican politics, died at age 81 on May 14. Ten days earlier, he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that he had led a robust bid during the early months of the 2016 presidential contest to find what he...

Yahoo has tripled down on what was already the largest data breach in history, saying it affected all 3 billion accounts on its service, not the 1 billion it revealed late last year. The company announced Tuesday that it’s providing notice to additional user accounts affected by the August 2013 data theft. […] Following its acquisition by Verizon in June, Yahoo says, it obtained new intelligence while investigating the breach with help from outside forensic experts. It says the stolen customer information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data or bank account information. …

The federal government on Friday told election officials in 21 states that hackers targeted their systems before last year’s presidential election. The notification came roughly a year after U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials first said states were targeted by hacking efforts possibly connected to Russia. The states that told The Associated Press they had been targeted included some key political battlegrounds, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. The AP contacted every state election office to determine which ones had been informed that their election systems had been targeted. The others confirming were Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado,...

We have been fed a dangerous lie that will cut to the very heart of freedom in America (and elsewhere soon enough). When the politicians and the media talk about “hackers,” they are telling a flat out narrative that barely exists above a whisper in the real world. They have made these “hackers” into “demons working for dangerous nations” to make us fear what is an almost non-existent threat. The real reason they are spinning this tale is far more nefarious. This whole effort is to shut down conservative voices and be lauded as heroes for it. Internet controls, censorship,...

It was inevitable that someday, hackers would have the ability to exert control over the U.S. electrical grid.  According to the computer security firm Symantec, someday is today. Hacking attacks over the last several months that targeted U.S. energy companies have been able to gain "operational control" over systems, thus threatening blackouts across the U.S., says Symantec.  The hacker group known as DragonFly 2.0 was able to gain control in at least 20 places, according to the firm. Wired: Symantec on Wednesday revealed a new campaign of attacks by a group it is calling Dragonfly 2.0, which it says...

Advanced hackers have targeted United States and European energy companies in a cyber espionage campaign that has in some cases successfully broken into the core systems that control the companies’ operations, according to researchers at the security firm Symantec. Malicious email campaigns have been used to gain entry into organizations in the United States, Turkey and Switzerland, and likely other countries well. The cyber attacks, which began in late 2015 but increased in frequency in April of this year, are probably the work of a foreign government and bear the hallmarks of a hacking group known as Dragonfly. The research...

Is this woman not a moron or what? The Russian hacker recorded the conversation. This is just golden. Listen to how stupid this Democrat is. This is the leadership of the Democratic party along with Nancy Pelosi. See video, even with Russian subtitles.

The prolonged hacking into the White House Office of Personnel Management, which put the personal information of at least some 21.5 million past and current federal employees in jeopardy, is only the beginning of the security threat to the Obama Administration and its successors, a number of top-level experts in cybersecurity have told Fox News. The attack has been frequently sourced as coming from China. The experts warned that the entire U.S. national security clearance system could be compromised, that future senior government leaders and advisors could be targeted even before taking office, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of government officials...

While the headlines over the past week have been swamped with coverage over the candidates bidding for the 2016 presidential election and a “trans-racial” NAACP leader lying about her race, critically important issues that are detrimental to our national security have gone virtually unnoticed. For instance, on Friday we learned that as many as 14 million current and former civilian U.S. government employees had their information compromised in an unprecedented attack by Chinese hackers. In a late Friday news dump, the Associated Press announced that the hackers stole, “Social Security numbers, military records and veterans’ status information, addresses, birth dates,...

A mysterious IT specialist, who goes by the name The Forensicator, published a detailed report that appears to disprove the theory that the DNC was hacked by Russia. The documents were copied on July 5th, five days before Seth Rich was murdered. The Forensicator summarized the complex report into 10 bullet points.

Ukrainian police on Tuesday seized the servers of an accounting software firm suspected of spreading a malware virus which crippled computer systems at major companies around the world last week, a senior police official said. The head of Ukraine's Cyber Police, Serhiy Demedyuk, told Reuters the servers of M.E.Doc - Ukraine's most popular accounting software - had been seized as part of an investigation into the attack. Though they are still trying to establish who was behind last week's attack, Ukrainian intelligence officials and security firms have said some of the initial infections were spread via a malicious update issued...

Here's what you need to know about the leak. How do we know this is the work of Russia? Cybersecurity experts who initially responded to the DNC hack identified two distinct groups of hackers operating in the system -- one who had exclusively gone after the party's opposition research file on Donald Trump, and one that had been snooping on DNC emails for about a year. Both were recognized as known Russian military or intelligence-affiliated hacking operations. Crowdstrike, the firm that responded to the hack, tracks dozens of advanced cyberespionage operations, many affiliated with governments. Each group has distinct ways...

The Inconvenient Truth of A Failed Coup - A Timeline April '16 - Nov '16 - Reuters May 18th, 2017 - according to 'current and former officials', 18 undisclosed contacts between **April '16 and Nov '16** - no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion 'in communications reviewed so far,' 'according to four current officials' and contacts focused on mending US-Russia relations, fighting Isis in Syria and containing an agressive China. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-contacts-idUSKCN18E106 April '16 or earlier - Steele is hired by "groups and donors supporting Republican opponents" http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/politics/christopher-steele-fbi-expenses/index.html [NOTE: Fusion claims a republican client hired them prior to the June hiring of...

Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. said on Friday hackers used malware to steal customers’ card data, including account number, expiration date and internal verification codes, from payment systems at some of its restaurants over a span of three weeks.... ... The information could be used to drain bank accounts, if a debit card was used, or to make credit card purchases, said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The Cost Of Arrogance I hate having to use this.... Told ya! It wasn't that long ago that I wrote a few articles on the hubris of our government thinking they were the smartest people in the room when it came to computer hacking. I pointed out that while we undoubtedly have very smart people working for the NSA and other three-letter agencies so do other nations and their people, along with "unaffiliated" folks who are just plain old-fashioned troublemakers, are equally smart. Indeed, that was the focus of an article from 10/2014 in relation to one of Comey's brain-farts...