Free Republic

President Barack Obama is going to get his blackberry. On Monday, a government agency that the Obama administration -- but that is probably the National Security Agency -- added to a standard blackberry a super-encryption package.... and Obama WILL be able to use it ... still for routine and personal messages. It's not clear whether he yet has the device. With few exceptions, government Blackberries aren't designed for encryption that protects messages above the "SECRET" status, so it's not clear whether Obama is getting something new and special. The exception: the Sectera Edge from General Dynamics, which allows for TOP...

i have an unsecured wireless network in my apartment. I recently was on my laptop and the touchpad mouse was disabled saying it had been disabled because a new pointing device had been added to my computer, that was weird because i had not plugged a mouse into the laptop. After that I notice a file i had never seen before on my desktop and I have no idea how it got there. so i checked the properties of the file and it said it had been last accessed at a time that i was not even home, and no...

"IT'S NOT SO MUCH THAT THE HAMAS OFFICER WAS KILLED... ...it's that he was killed operating a mortar that his subordinates were not firing, because they refused to come out of hiding."

Link only - Hackers take down ring of key progressive blogs

"THE BRIEF LIFE AND EXQUISITE MARTYRDOM OF A HAMAS MORTAR CREW" Snippet: "Via Hamas' al-Aqsa TV station, said to be filmed in Jabaliya on 06 January 2008. At about 1'15" the crew is hit by an apparent Israeli counter-strike."

In the wake of the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas, it didn’t take long before pro-Hamas supporters organized themselves and started to defacing thousands of pro-Israeli web sites in order to use them as vehicles for propaganda — Israel is meanwhile hijacking TV signals. For the time being, pro-Israeli sites remain automatically probed for web application vulnerabilities through search engines reconnaissance of the Israeli web space by JURM-TEAM and TEAM-Evil, two groups working together and using identical templates for the defaced sites.Compared to previous hacktivism (politically motivated hacking)  activities on behalf of this group consisting primarily of mass web...

Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, told a conference in New York that computer attacks pose the biggest risk "from a national security perspective, other than a weapon of mass destruction or a bomb in one of our major cities." "Other than a nuclear device or some other type of destructive weapon, the threat to our infrastructure, the threat to our intelligence, the threat to our computer network is the most critical threat we face," he added. US experts talk of "cybergeddon," in which an advanced economy -- where almost everything of importance is linked to or...

US President-elect Barack Obama was among a number of high-profile people whose Twitter accounts were hacked overnight. After breaking into Twitter's system, the hackers posted defamatory and offensive messages to the celebrity profiles, news.com.au reports..

"OPERATION CAST LEAD The IDF's Fight Against Terror in Gaza" # A blessed New Year to everyone here and abroad. Today's thread beginning January 1, 2009 (U.S.A. Time)

The chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission says homosexual activists have launched a criminal attack on his ministry. Recently, Dr. Ted Baehr says he learned about the distribution of a number of emails and blog posts that were supposedly from him or his organization. However, the emails were links to pornography, including homosexual content.

Microsoft warned Saturday of a "huge increase" in attacks exploiting a critical unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE), and said some originated from hacked pornography sites. Other researchers confirmed that attacks were increasingly coming from compromised Web sites. Microsoft noted the upswing in attacks on the company's Malware Protection Center blog late Saturday. "The trend for now is going upwards," said researchers Ziv Mador and Tareq Saadecom on the blog. "We saw a huge increase in the number of reports today compared to yesterday." Hackers have been exploiting a data binding bug in IE for more than a week ,...

Hackers on Tuesday hijacked the Web site CheckFree.com, one of the largest online bill payment companies, redirecting an unknown number of visitors to a Web address that tried to install malicious software on visitors' computers, the company said today. The attack, first reported by The Register, a security news Web site, began in the early morning hours of Dec. 2, when Checkfree's home page and the customer login page were redirected to a server in the Ukraine. CheckFree spokeswoman Melanie Tolley said users who visited the sites during the attack would have been redirected to a blank page that tried...

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC) November 23, 2008 Iran and Hamas declare digital war against Israel: Hamas recently participated in a digital communications exhibition in Tehran and was involved in establishing a group calling itself “The Digital Intifada.” Its objective was to develop websites to fight Israel and encourage the criminal activity of hacking Israeli websites.

WASHINGTON - Before he ran for president Barack Obama quit smoking. Now that he's won the job, he may have to break another addiction: Checking his BlackBerry for e-mail. The president's e-mail can be subpoenaed by Congress and courts and may be subject to public records laws, so if a president doesn't want his e-mail public, he shouldn't e-mail, experts said. And there may be security issues about carrying around trackable cell phones

Another major international financial institution has had its computer system attacked by unknown cyber-hackers, FOX News has learned. The discovery of the assault last week threw into crisis the Washington, D.C. based International Monetary Fund (IMF), which offers emergency financial aid to countries faced with balance-of-payments problems, and provoked a shutdown of IMF computers that lasted for several days. In October, FOX News reported that the computer system at the World Bank had also been hacked over a period of months. FOX News has been unable to determine what, if any, information may have been obtained by the hackers. The...

Last week, the computer hacker Gary McKinnon was given a Thursday deadline to apply for an oral judicial review, which is the last legal challenge that could stop his extradition to the United States. As he runs out of time and chances, it seems to me and others from across the political spectrum that we should look again at the fundamental case for extradition. There are strong arguments for allowing McKinnon to stand trial in the UK and serve any sentence in this country. The London-based hacker, who is alleged to have broken through Pentagon and Nasa security, has recently...

Newsweek says feds told Obama's team it had 'a problem way bigger than you understand' Computer systems used by the election campaigns of both President-elect Barack Obama and his Republican rival Sen. John McCain were broken into earlier this year, and a large number of files related to the evolving policy positions of the two candidates were stolen, according to a story posted online today by Newsweek magazine. The attacks appear to have been perpetrated by an unidentified "foreign entity" looking to steal information that might be useful in future negotiations with the next U.S. president, Newsweek reported, quoting several...

With barely time to savour his triumph, Barack Obama has been confronted with various international crises to test his mettle. The U.S. President-elect faces threats from Russia, Israel and Afghanistan as it emerged his election team's computers were hacked by a 'foreign entity' during the election. Officials at the FBI and the White House believe the hackers sought to gather information on the evolution of both his and Senator John McCain's policy positions with the idea of using that information in negotiations with the next administration. Obama technical experts later speculated the hackers were Russian or Chinese, and security ended...

I’m leaving blow-by-blow coverage of election results to the approximately one million sites that will be looking at them in detail all through the night, but in the true spirit of election day, here’s a really nasty trick to consider. As an article by Scott Berinato in this month’s Wired magazine describes, distributed denial-of-service attacks can shut down the web servers of companies and organizations within minutes, even if they’ve taken measures to protect themselves. How do they work? Hackers penetrate inadequately protected computers (yours?) and install software (a “bot”) that hides in the background until it’s triggered by a...

SAN FRANCISCO — Savvy Internet users know that downloading unsolicited computer programs is one of the most dangerous things you can do online. It puts you at great risk for a virus or another time bomb from a hacker. But even some sophisticated surfers could get taken in by a sneaky new attack in which criminals create fake YouTube pages — dead-on replicas of the real site — to push their malicious software and make it look like it's safe stuff coming from a trusted source.