Free Republic

Anonymous, the hacktivist collective that declared "total war" on ISIS after November's terror attacks in Paris, asked its followers to participate in 'ISIS Trolling Day' on Dec. 11, RT reports. In a message on Ghostbin, Anonymous announced "The World against ISIS Project," asking followers to "show your support and help against ISIS by joining us and trolling them." "Do not think you have to be apart of Anonymous, anyone can do this and does not require any special skills," the message adds. The project provides tips on how to troll ISIS online, suggesting participants spread photos of dead ISIS members...

Clare W. Bronfman, an heiress of the Seagram Company business empire, allegedly implanted a "key logger" virus on the computer of her late father, Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., so officials with the NXIVM corporation could secretly monitor his emails, including his exchanges with world leaders and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to court records. The extraordinary allegations are attributed to Kristen M. Keeffe, who was part of the inner circle that ran NXIVM, a "human development" organization that has been described by one expert as an "extreme cult." The accusations by Keeffe are contained in a transcript of a...

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email scandal didn’t stop the head of the CIA from using his own personal AOL account to stash work-related documents, according to a stoner high school student who claims to have hacked into them. CIA Director John Brennan’s private account held sensitive files — including his 47-page application for top-secret security clearance — until he recently learned that it had been infiltrated, the hacker told The Post. Other emails stored in Brennan’s non-government account contained the Social Security numbers and personal information of more than a dozen top American intelligence officials, as well as a government letter...

Smart power. So much smart power. I don't know if anyone has ever tapped into this much smart power before. Picture a nerd screeching about "smart power" while the school bullies beat him up and you've got a picture of Obama's awesome smart power foreign policy. America's enemies now make a special point of humiliating him after each fake agreement and deal. Iran tests ballistic missiles and convicts a US reporter right after ratifying the nuke deal. And China makes a point of slapping Obama around right after his latest fake agreement with China. It was heralded as the first...

Global law enforcement agencies have arrested a gang member behind the theft of £20 million ($30.7 million) via a piece of malicious software that records banking details, and are on the hunt for the remaining members. The malware – known as Dridex – is believed to be developed by in eastern Europe and it's able to harvest bank details online in order to steal money from people. Global financial institutions and a variety of different payment systems have been targeted, the U.K.'s National Crime Agency (NCA), one of the authorities involved, said on Tuesday. "Thousands" of Brits have been infected...

Matthew Keys, former deputy social media editor for the Reuters news agency, was convicted Wednesday for his role in a conspiracy to hack Los Angeles Times and Tribune Co. servers. Keys, 28, who also was a web producer for KTXL Fox 40 in Sacramento, a Tribune-owned television station, provided members of the hacker group Anonymous with login information for Tribune servers in 2010. Though Keys faces up to 25 years in prison at his sentencing, U.S. attorney's office spokeswoman Lauren Horwood said prosecutors are "likely" to seek less than five years.

A technology subcontractor that has worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail setup expressed concerns over the summer that the system was inadequately protected and vulnerable to hackers, a company official said Wednesday. But the concerns were rebuffed by the company managing the Clinton account, Platte River Networks, which said it had been instructed by the FBI not to make changes. The FBI has been reviewing the security of the e-mail system. The subcontractor, Datto, which specializes in backing up data, had not been aware that it was handling Clinton e-mails until media reports in August noted Platte River Networks’ involvement...

A private industry IT security firm tells Fox News that personal data stolen over the span of several high-profile U.S. cyber breaches is being indexed by China's intelligence service into a massive Facebook-like network. According to CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch, Chinese hackers are using information gained from the breaches of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, as well as intrusions into the Anthem and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield health insurance networks, to build a complete profile of federal employees in what the company calls a "Facebook of Everything." "That can now be used to embarrass you publicly and force you to...

Two reports on Thursday should send alarm bells clanging to beef up the government's cybersecurity. Whether anyone in the Obama administration will hear them is another question.

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...