Free Republic

Hackers demanding ransom payable in bitcoin have attacked computers of the Atlanta city government in the southern US state of Georgia, officials say. The ransomware assault shut down multiple internal and external applications for the city, including apps that people use to pay bills and access court-related information, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told a news conference Thursday. "This is a very serious situation," Bottoms said. City officials said they learned of the attack before dawn Thursday when they detected unusual activity on their servers. Some of the city's data had become encrypted. A ransom note sent to the city gave...

The Department of Justice has alleged that nine hackers with ties to the Iranian government engaged in a massive cybertheft scheme to steal scientific data and intellectual property from hundreds of U.S. and foreign universities, private companies and government agencies.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden ripped Facebook in a tweet Saturday after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked worked for President Trump’s campaign. Facebook accused the firm on Friday of not deleting data it had improperly harvested from Facebook users, which number in the tens of millions, but Snowden pinned the blame squarely on Facebook and lumped in other social media companies for being just as reckless. "Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as 'surveillance companies,'" Snowden said. "Their rebranding...

With the Illinois primary just days away, state election officials are beefing up cyber defenses and scanning for possible intrusions into voting systems and voter registration rolls. They have good reason to be on guard: Two years ago, Illinois was the lone state known to have its state election system breached in a hacking effort that ultimately targeted 21 states. Hackers believe[d] to be connected to Russia penetrated the state’s voter rolls, viewing data on some 76,000 Illinois voters, although there is no indication any information was changed. Since then, Illinois election officials have added firewalls, installed software designed to...

Working with dubious sourcing, a group close to NATO's chief military commander Philip Breedlove sought to secure weapons deliveries for Ukraine, a trove of newly released emails revealed. The efforts served to intensify the conflict between the West and Russia. Most of the 1,096 hacked emails date back to the dramatic 12 months of the Ukraine crisis after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Thousands died in the skirmishes between Kiev's troops and Moscow-aligned separatists. More than 2 million civilians fled eastern Ukraine. Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's...

The admission revealed the identity behind a big data breach. Nghia Hoang Pho, 67. Nghia, Carted home, “Top Secret” and “Sensitive Compartmented”, Information for over five years. These files were downloaded onto Pho’s personal computer and then routinely harvested by Russian intelligence. Pho took a mix of digital and physical info home between 2010 and 2015. he was using it to rewrite his resume -- this was intentional, but not spiteful. Pho may face prison time when he's sentenced on April 6th, but prosecutors “are open to calls for a lighter sentence” given the non-malicious nature of the case. It...

Last month, a local California newspaper left more than 19 million voter records exposed online. Gizmodo confirmed this week that the records were compromised during an apparent ransomware attack. The Sacramento Bee said in a statement that a firewall protecting its database was not restored during routine maintenance last month, leaving the 19,501,258 voter files publicly accessible. Additionally, the names, home addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers of 52,873 Sacramento Bee subscribers were compromised. “We take this incident seriously and have begun efforts to notify each of the individuals on the contact list and to provide them resources to help...

British 15-year-old gained access to intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran by pretending to be head of CIA, court hears A 15-year-old gained access to plans for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran by pretending to be the head of the CIA to gain access to his computers, a court has heard. From the bedroom of the Leicestershire home he shared with his mother, Kane Gamble used “social engineering” – where a person builds up a picture of information and uses it manipulate others into handing over more – to access the personal and work accounts of some of America's...

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...

Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows. Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.”...

Romanian hackers allegedly took control of about two-thirds of the D.C. police department’s outdoor security cameras during a four-day period one week before President Trump’s inauguration. The city’s Metropolitan Police Department informed the Secret Service on Jan. 12 about an issue using a remote desktop application, leading to discovery of a large infection affecting computers connected to the cameras. “Further investigation and analysis revealed that approximately 123 of the MPDC’s 187 outdoor surveillance cameras had been accessed and compromised,” according to an affidavit by U.S. Secret Service special agent James Graham.

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,...