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Susan Rice, President Barack Obama's former national security adviser, on Wednesday declined Sen. Lindsey Graham's request to participate in a judiciary subcommittee hearing next week on Russian interference in the US election, CNN has learned. A letter obtained exclusively by CNN from Rice's lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, outlines the grounds for her decision not to appear. It was addressed to Graham, the Republican chairman of the judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism, which is holding the hearing, and senior Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse. "Senator Whitehouse has informed us by letter that he did not agree to Chairman Graham's invitation to Ambassador Rice,...

Since FlexiSpy burnt their entire network driving us out, we think it's time for us to release our HowTo guide for aspiring hackers, about what we did, and how you can do it, too. This is going out there to help people learn how to hack and how to defend themselves, as is traditional after these types of hacks. There are lots of articles out there written by other talented hackers that would serve as excellent introductions, but we'd be remiss if we didn't include Phineas Fisher's articles, which are fantastic introductions [1][2][3]. They cover things like how to stay...

The latest dump of hacking tools allegedly belonged to the NSA is believed to be the most damaging release by the Shadow Brokers till the date. But after analyzing the disclosed exploits, Microsoft security team says most of the windows vulnerabilities exploited by these hacking tools, including EternalBlue, EternalChampion, EternalSynergy, EternalRomance and others, are already patched in the last month's Patch Tuesday update. "Most of the exploits that were disclosed fall into vulnerabilities that are already patched in our supported products. Customers still running prior versions of these products are encouraged to upgrade to a supported offering," Microsoft Security Team...

Mike Pompeo said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange portrays himself as a crusader but in fact helps enemies of the United States, including Russia ___ Mike Pompeo said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange portrays himself as a crusader but in fact helps enemies of the United States, including Russia “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence... And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organisations,” said Pompeo. “It is time to call out...

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton slammed Russia's meddling in the U.S. presidential election, describing it as an "act of aggression" meant to influence the election, and said potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians should be looked at. "I am deeply concerned about what went on with Russia," she said, adding that she favors an independent non-partisan investigation into the hacking. Clinton spoke at the Women in the World conference in New York City on Thursday. The conference marks the first time that Clinton has answered interview questions publicly since losing the presidential election in November to...

Russian television station RT reported that Levashov was arrested under a U.S. international arrest warrant and was suspected of being involved in hacking attacks linked to alleged interference in last year's U.S. election. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division, said: "The U.S. case remains under seal, so we have no information to provide at this time." The criminal division is separate from the national security division, which is responsible for investigating state-sponsored cyber crimes.

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking whether a suspected former Russian intelligence officer-turned U.S. lobbyist and the firm behind the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier should have registered as foreign agents for their efforts to bring down a U.S. law on behalf of the Kremlin. According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department, Fusion GPS, which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, was involved in the pro-Russia campaign to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time. In 2012, President Obama signed into...

Scandal: While the momentum behind the Russia-election-meddling story chugs along, the claim that sparked the entire drama — that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee — appears to have suffered a big blow. Does anybody care? The Russia connection was first made by a private cybersecurity firm whose work has been treated as unassailable — until last week, when it had to rewrite and retract statements made to support that claim. To understand what happened and why it is significant requires going through a brief timeline of events.

In a development that could have substantial implications to the ongoing "Russia hacked the US elections" narrative, United Arab Emirates media reports that Dubai police have arrested a group of foreign hackers that targeted five White House officials in an email blackmail scheme. The Arabic-language Al Bayan newspaper and the television channel Dubai One reported the arrests on Monday according to AP. Dubai police did not answer repeated calls for comment. The Al Bayan quoted Maj. Saud al-Khalidi of Dubai police as saying an "African gang", broke into the emails of the five senior officials and "got highly confidential information."...

The Trump Dossier upon which the whole Russiagate scandal rests describes a process of decision making within the Russian government that bears no relation to reality, thereby proving itself a fake. It has become increasingly clear over the last two weeks that the amateur sleuths who are driving Russiagate are taking the Trump Dossier prepared by the British ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele as their starting point. This is despite the fact that the Trump Dossier is still “uncorroborated”, and has been trashed by seasoned intelligence professionals like former CIA Acting Assistant Director Michael Morell. Right from the first moment the...

In one of the most appropriate and well deserved April Fools’ Day pranks of all time, the Russian Foreign Ministry posted on its Facebook page an audio file that supposedly showed the agency’s new switchboard message.

"You have reached the Russian embassy, your call is very important to us. To arrange a call from a Russian diplomat to your political opponent, press 1. To use the services of Russian hackers press 2. To request election interference, press 3 and wait until the next election campaign. Please note that all calls are recorded for quality improvement and training purposes."

Reported in January, the FBI based its decision that it was the Russians that hacked into the DNC computers on a report commissioned by the DNC and generated by a company called CrowdStrike (the FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC server). The VOA recently caught CrowdStrike creating a bogus and unrelated hacking charge against Russia, and making up the facts to prove its veracity. To make their determination that the Democrats were hacked by Russia, the FBI relied exclusively on information from private digital forensics company Crowdstrike. It wasn’t the FBI’s fault the DNC wouldn’t allow the FBI...

Apple is reassuring customers that its systems have not been breached while a hacker, or hackers, threaten to remotely wipe hundreds of millions iPhones of all their data, including photos, videos, and messages. The hackers are using an alleged cache of stolen email accounts and passwords as leverage in an attempt to extort the world's most valuable company. They claim to have access to as many as 559 million Apple email and iCloud accounts, Vice blog Motherboard reported on Tuesday. The group, calling itself "Turkish Crime Family," said it would delete its alleged list of compromised login credentials only after...

Before I get to the meat of this post, we need to revisit a little history. The cyber security firm hired to inspect the DNC hack and determine who was responsible is a firm called Crowdstrike. Its conclusion that Russia was responsible was released last year, but several people began to call its analysis into question upon further inspection. Jeffrey Carr was one of the most prominent cynics, and as he noted in his December post, FBI/DHS Joint Analysis Report: A Fatally Flawed Effort:

A new WikiLeaks Vault 7 leak titled “Dark Matter” claims, with unreleased documents, that the Central Intelligence Agency has been bugging “factory fresh” iPhones since at least 2008. WikiLeaks further claims that the CIA has the capability to permanently bug iPhones, even if their operating systems are deleted or replaced.The documents are expected to be released after a 10 a.m. EDT “press briefing” that WikiLeaks promoted on its Twitter. RELEASE: CIA #Vault7 "Dark Matter" https://t.co/pgnfeODXVB pic.twitter.com/vkI16f3vMD— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 23, 2017 Watch a livestream of the Julian Assange led event here. WATCH: WikiLeaks Vault 7 Livestream on CIA ‘Dark Matter’...

TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2017 The real hacking scandal the MSM ignore I feel like I'm living in some parallel universe. The news media, the Democrats, and even some Republicans continue to beat the drum of some sort of collusion between Trump and the Russians. What if I told you that neither the FBI nor any other intelligence agency had ever inspected the DNC servers that were supposedly hacked? That would be front-page news, right? It’s true. FBI Director James Comey confirmed it in testimony in January and again this week before the House Intelligence Committee. If the FBI didn’t determine...

President Trump’s former campaign chairman on Monday denied any ties to or contact with the Russian government after the FBI confirmed it is investigating Trump allies’ alleged links to Moscow. Paul Manafort said he “had no involvement” in Russia’s intervention in the 2016 presidential elections, including its email hacking of prominent Democratic groups and figures, and never spoke to Russian officials who claimed to be involved. “The suggestion that I ever worked in concert with anyone to release hacked emails or sought to undermine the interests of the United States is false,” he said in a statement. The former top...

The democrats are doing a full court press in trying to prove Russia influenced our elections. Ok, if true, why then was Russia so successful in hacking, spying and actively disrupting our democratic processes under President Obama? Complete intelligence breakdown or what? Obama's criminal negligence and incompetence? Obama/Hillary complicity? Obama sound asleep at the switch? Or what?

As the discussion over wiretapping and foreign hacking still dominates the conversation in Washington, an unusually high amount of suspicious cell phone activity in the nation’s capital has caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns that U.S. officials are being monitored by a foreign entity. The issue was first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, but a source at telecom security firm ESD America confirmed the spike in suspicious activity to CBS News. ESD America, hired preemptively for a DHS pilot program this January called ESD Overwatch, first noticed suspicious activity around cell phone towers in...