Free Republic

A Reuters reporter admits he offered to hide damaging information about Beto O’Rourke during the Democrat’s tight Senate race against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). On Friday morning, Reuters journalist Joseph Menn broke the news that, as a teen, O’Rourke, who is now a freshly-minted 2020 presidential candidate, was part of a secret hacking group known as the Cult of the Dead Cow.Since publication, Reuters has also been forced to admit their reporter, who was on leave at the time, knew all about O’Rourke’s hacker past during the 2018 Texas Senate race but offered not to reveal it until after the race:

Beto O'Rourke was a teenage computer hacker who posted fiction about killing children, it was revealed Friday - a day after he threw himself into the Democratic president race. O'Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview with the author of a forthcoming book that he belonged to the Cult of the Dead Cow, the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history. Members of the hugely influential CDC, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, have protected his secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. But O'Rourke said in an interview conducted during his failed run for the Senate...

ORINDA — Laura Lyons was preparing food in her kitchen Sunday when the lazy afternoon took a turn for the absurd. A loud squawking — similar to the beginning of an emergency broadcast alert — blasted from the living room, the Orinda mother said, followed by a detailed warning of three North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to Los Angeles, Chicago and Ohio. “It warned that the United States had retaliated against Pyongyang and that people in the affected areas had three hours to evacuate,” Lyons said Monday. “It sounded completely legit, and it was loud and got our attention...

Classified military information including missile plans have been stolen from contractors working for the US Navy by hackers linked to China, according to reports. Contractors working for the US Navy have reportedly suffered a series of breaches in the past 18 months. Richard Spencer, the secretary of the US Navy, has ordered a review of cybersecurity threats, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The review follows reports of the theft of classified plans for a supersonic anti-ship missile to be used by submarines. The plans for the missile were found to have been stolen in June during a hacking...

RUSH: Well, well, well, if anybody doubts the political nature of the Mueller investigation, all you have to do is take a look at the news today. For crying out loud, they really want us to believe that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange three times before WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails? Where’s this story been? If this were true, they would have known this all the way back when Obama and his buddies were spying on the Trump campaign. And we would have heard about this long before today. So what the heck is going on? Greetings, my friends,...

The U.S. power grid is continuing to be targeted and probed by Russian cyber actors, according to a notable cybersecurity firm, as well as other aspects of critical infrastructure (CI). Researched from the threat intelligence firm FireEye said at the CyberwarCon forum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that even though the American power grid is relatively well-defended and tough to strike with a full-scale cyber attack, that hasn’t deterred Russian state actors from continuing to probe for weaknesses...

A government computer system that interacts with HealthCare.gov was hacked earlier this month, compromising the sensitive personal data of some 75,000 people, officials said Friday. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services made the announcement late in the afternoon ahead of a weekend, a time slot agencies often use to release unfavorable developments. Officials said the hacked system was shut down and technicians are working to restore it before sign-up season starts Nov. 1 for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. About 10 million people currently have private coverage under former President Barack Obama’s health care law. …

I just got a phone call saying that my Microsoft 10 account has been compromised by any of several foreign sources, and that I should contact the phone number they have to set up a firewall against it being taken down or loss of all information they have on the cloud under this account. I small a rat.

A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter. The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time. The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing. A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News...

Molly Hall, a spokeswoman for the DEFCON event, said the mock websites were built by Brian Markus, who she called a “world-renowned security expert.” In total, 35 of 39 participants ages 6-17 successfully hacked mock versions of Secretary of State websites in six swing states during a portion of the convention called the Voting Machine Hacking Village, according to event organizers. The “hackers” managed to tamper with vote tallies, party names and candidate names, changing vote tallies to numbers like 12 billion and candidate names to “Bob Da Builder” and “Richard Nixon’s head.”

Cash machines could be mass-hacked in global cyber attack, FBI warns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/08/13/uk-cash-machines-could-mass-hacked-global-cyber-attack-fbi-warns/ By: Natasha Bernal  13 AUGUST 2018 • 2:06PM Banks have been warned of an imminent threat that their cash machines could be mass-hacked by cyber criminals. In a confidential alert on Friday, America's Federal Bureau of Investigation told international banks that criminals are plotting a concerted global malware attack on cash machines in the next few days.  The FBI issued a warning about a highly choreographed fraud scheme known as an ATM "jackpotting", in which crooks hack a bank or payment card processor and use cloned cards at cash machines around the world to...

North Korea is rapidly amassing capabilities with arguably greater destructive potential than nuclear or ballistic missiles. Pyongyang’s elaborate licit and illicit financial networks grow more sophisticated and its army of cyber warriors grows more adept with each passing day, posing fearsome threats to Northeast Asia, the United States, and the entire international system. Meanwhile, behind a veil of nuclear belligerence, the ruling Kim family has been quietly and painstakingly preparing to fight the next war: a “Secret War” waged not with guns and bullets, but with information and network access. Former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis describes cyber as a...

WASHINGTON — The hackers’ targets: The former head of cybersecurity for the U.S. Air Force. An ex-director at the National Security Council. A former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. All were caught up in a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage campaign. None was warned by the FBI. The bureau repeatedly failed to alert targets of the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear despite knowing for more than a year that their personal emails were in the Kremlin’s sights, an Associated Press investigation has found. “No one’s ever said to me, ‘Hey Joe, you’ve been targeted by this Russian group,'” said...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) New analysis of malware campaigns suggests that North Korean hackers may have re-used malware and computer infrastructure, leaving a trail which increasingly allow incidents to be traced back to them. Examination of malware believed to be associated with North Korean cyber operations found the same code is often re-used in multiple attacks -- and increasing the confidence that a string of campaigns over the last decade have been the work of the hackers in the country. The joint research by security firms McAfee and Intezer reveals new connections between attacks believed to be the work of North Korea, a...

On Tuesday, I was asked to testify to Congress about a proposed bipartisan “Shield” law that would protect reporters from going to prison if they refuse to reveal their confidential sources. There are exemptions in the proposed law for instances where national security is at risk or lives are in danger. (Thank you to Congressmen Jordan, Raskin, Meadows, Palmer, Krishnamoorthi and Grothman.) At the hearing, I was asked about the government intrusion of my computers. CBS Confirms Sharyl Attkisson’s Computer Hacked The testimony starts :55 minutes into the YouTube link of the hearing below. If you’re interested in the questions...

The Illinois state election board said Friday that it is likely the state referred to in special counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictment as having been hacked into by Russian intelligence officers, the Chicago Tribune reported. Illinois officials said Friday that they had requested confirmation from the Justice Department that it was the state mentioned in the indictment. The hack has been public knowledge for nearly two years, with the FBI issuing an alert about the cyber attack in August 2016, one month after it took place. “We are grateful that DOJ has identified who the perpetrators are,” state election board...

The Pentagon has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups. The U.S. Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election. In the fall of 2008, Russian intelligence agencies penetrated SIPRNet, the Pentagon’s secret internal network; that led to a rush to consolidate several cyberprograms into a command. The Chinese, meanwhile, were stealing weapons designs, including blueprints for...

As Sweden moves ever closer to a cashless economy, tourists are starting to complain, according to state promotion agency Visit Sweden.Ewa Lagerqvist, the agency’s chief executive, told Sweden’s TT newswire that Germans, who frequently use cash at home, expect to be able to do so in Sweden as well. “The Germans want to avoid the charges which banks take out on card payments, but they also cite deep-rooted privacy concerns when they consider why they want to be able to use cash,” she said. “For the Brits, it’s more purely the bank charges which annoy them.” Tourists also complain that...

There's an extremely serious dump of emails that came from Wikileaks exposing Hillary Clinton for ordering top US Diplomats to steal the DNA and passwords from United Nations leadership. The stunning email comes from the account of Hillary Clinton that used the address “hdr22@clintonemail.com”.

Twitter is urging its users to change their passwords following a bug that was identified on the social media platform. While the bug has since been fixed, the company assures users there were no signs of breach or misuse of the passwords by anyone. In an effort to establish complete transparency, Twitter Chief Technical Officer Parag Agrawal took to Twitter’s blog to explain exactly what happened. When setting a password on your Twitter account, the platform uses technology that masks it so that no one else at the company can see it. Twitter’s passwords are masked through a process called...