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Critical infrastructure operators in the U.S. continue to face a hailstorm of hacks. Federal documents obtained by USA Today through a FOIA request revealed that hackers infiltrated the Department of Energy's computer system over 150 times between 2010 and 2014. As the department overseeing the country's power grid and nuclear weapons stockpile, the Energy Department is an attractive target for overseas cyber spies seeking to uncover vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is warning critical infrastructure providers of a malicious spear-phishing campaign in which hackers use bogus emails to infiltrate users' networks. The campaign has targeted government facilities and...

The U.S. government has not yet notified any of the 21.5 million federal employees and contractors whose security clearance data was hacked more than three months ago, officials acknowledged on Tuesday. The agency whose data was hacked, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), said the Defense Department will begin "later this month" to notify employees and contractors across the government that their personal information was accessed by hackers. OPM said notifications would continue over several weeks and "will be sent directly to impacted individuals." OPM also announced that it hired a contractor to help protect the identities and credit ratings...

Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other kind of cyberattack during the past two years, according to a survey by KPMG.The KPMG report also states that only half of those executives feel that they are adequately prepared to prevent future attacks. The attacks place sensitive patient data at risk of exposure, KPMG said.The 2015 KPMG Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey polled 223 CIOs, CTOs, chief security officers and chief compliance officers at healthcare providers and health plans.Sixty-six percent of the IT executives at healthcare plans who were surveyed said they...

The overwhelming majority of California's state agencies are ill-prepared to defend against cyberattacks, according to the state auditor, putting Social Security numbers, health records, and income tax information at risk for millions of Californians.

Ashley Madison has long claimed, in triumphant news releases and slick, Web-ready graphics, that it is one of the few dating sites that really clicks with women. According to statistics CEO Noel Biderman has trumpeted in the media, Ashley Madison enjoys an overall 70/30 gender split — with a 1:1 male/female ratio among the under-30 set. But the user records laid bare by hackers last week tell a very different story: Of the more than 35 million records released, only 5 million — a mere 15 percent — actually belonged to women. This discrepancy may be the smoking gun that...

Unconfirmed reports suggest that two people in Toronto have killed themselves over the Ashley Madison hack, local police said in a briefing providing details about the beginning of the leak. “As of this morning, we have two unconfirmed reports of suicides that are associated because of the leak of Ashley Madison customers’ profiles,” Toronto police service staff superintendent Bryce Evans said at a press conference on Monday. Evans said the nature of the dating site for married people was “of no interest to us as the investigative teams”. Security analyst Brian Krebs said last week he feared exactly that outcome....

John McAfee may no longer be associated with the famous security company he founded, but he still writes about and consults on the topic, and he now claims to know the Ashley Madison “hack” was, in fact, data stolen by a “lone female who worked for Avid Life Media.” His argument relies on two separate bits of evidence. First, McAfee says the files found in the leaked database contain some peculiarities that he wouldn’t expect a hacker to normally access. “The data contains actual MySQL database dumps,” he says, adding “this is not just someone copying a table and making...

The Ashley Madison hack is indeed ripping apart marriages. It's exposing affairs, confirming suspicions, and keeping cheaters up at night in cold sweats. Several people who were directly affected by the data breach of the cheating website AshleyMadison.com have reached out to CNNMoney. Their identities and details have been independently verified, but they have spoken on condition of anonymity. The mistress "Ana" is a highly educated business woman in her 40s who is finalizing a divorce with her husband. She stayed up late Thursday rapidly texting eight married men with whom she had relationships after finding them on Ashley Madison....

The AshleyMadison.com hack, which unleashed onto the Internet yesterday nearly 40 million names and email addresses of possible users who sought extramarital affairs, isn’t sexy enough for many plaintiffs lawyers. Reason No. 1: It’s a matter of taste. “Every one of your clients is from day one on record being a liar and a cheat,” said Thomas Loeser of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro. “I can’t think of a less desirable client.” After most online data hacks, class action suits materialize within days from plaintiffs firms that carry the cause. That hasn’t happened in the Ashley Madison hack. To some prominent...

A slew of leaked data reveals the names and addresses of users of the adultery dating website, including people in top jobs. Thousands of government and military officials are among those who appear to have been exposed by the huge Ashley Madison data dump. Hackers dropped a gigantic 10Gb file of information about users of the adultery dating website, sparking a scramble on the web to create a searchable database of all those named. Sky News has seen the raw data, which features the names and addresses of users - mostly in the US but many in the UK. The...

A breach of taxpayers' information at the Internal Revenue Service was bigger than initially disclosed, the agency said Monday. Hackers gained access to the information of as many as 220,000 more people than the 104,000 accounts that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in June may have been compromised. The IRS said it is mailing 220,000 letters notifying people that their information may be compromised. It said that it would also offer free credit protection and Identity Protection PINs to the victims. The revelation Monday is the result of an IRS review of an earlier incident in the spring, when hackers...

The hackers are selling Remote Access Trojan (RAT) to the interested wannabe hackers, and believe it or not, most of the purchasers of these malware programs are youngsters and novice hackers. The malware and Trojans being provided by the hackers will allow anyone to take control of the targeted electronic device, eventually attacking the victim. The report calls them “ratters.”

The ratchets have been turning lately on Nurse Ratched Hillary Clinton, over allegations of classified emails having been left on a private server. The Hillary camp is claiming this is a big bunch of nothing, that the server has been wiped clean, and that, besides, the emails were not marked as classified at the time she sent them. So, what's the big deal? Let's take a step back: outside of the election year, outside of partisan politics, and into the world of classified material. Some of the material itself is classified Top Secret. What's that mean? It sounds like James...

John Kerry claims his computer has been hacked, Chinese are ‘very likely’ reading his email

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton submitted a sworn declaration under penalty of perjury in a case involving Judicial Watch and their FOIA request to the State Department. At issue was whether the former Secretary of State had provided all of the work product e-mails during her time at State to the archivists, a point under contention in Judge Emmet Sullivan’s federal court. Sullivan had wanted a much broader explanation from Hillary as well as Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin in his July 31st order, but all he got back was this: I, Hillary Rodham Clinton, declare under penalty of perjury that...

Chinese cyberspies have been reading the private emails of Obama administration officials and "all top national security and trade officials" since 2010, according to a senior administration official and a top secret NSA document obtained by NBC. The email espionage — codenamed "Dancing Panda" by the US before being dubbed "Legion Amethyst" — was detected in April 2010. "The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on," NBC reported. "Dancing Panda" has successfully attacked at least 600 targets over the last five years, according to...

fficials tell NBC News that Russia launched a "sophisticated cyberattack" against the Pentagon's Joint Staff unclassified email system which has been shut down and taken off line for nearly two weeks. According to the officials, the "sophisticated cyber intrusion" occurred sometime around July 25 and affected some 4-thousand military and civilian personnel work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.

DETROIT, MI - A report in the Financial Times says cyber security researchers were able to hack into and gain control of a Tesla Model S and shut the vehicle down at a low speed. The electric car was going about five miles an hour when Marc Rogers, principal security researcher at Cloudfare, and Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, shut the car down, causing all of its screens to go black and the handbrake to come on.

In a recent WIRED article, security researchers Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger tackled just that issue. The wife and husband duo purchased two $13,000 TrackingPoint rifles and spent the last year reverse engineering and hacking the rifles’ computers. The two plan to present their research at the Black Hat hacker conference in two weeks, according to the article. TrackingPoint bills itself as a company comprised of “lifetime NRA members and engineers.” The products sold on its website seem standard enough when it comes to a gun company: bolt-action rifles, semi-automatic carbines, etc. The “5.56mm semi-auto,” basically a M16-type rifle, costs...

The maxim that “personnel is policy” transcends partisan affiliations and political labels. Every president, including President Barack Obama, has the authority to staff federal agencies with loyal political appointees.