Free Republic

In the year since the start of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, one thing has been notably absent: a public indictment of any Russians for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Mueller has charged President Trump’s former campaign chief, secured guilty pleas from several individuals in Trump’s orbit and indicted 13 Russians for an elaborate plot to leverage social media to influence the American electorate. But the special counsel has yet to announce charges for the hacking of the DNC, even though the intelligence community and private cybersecurity experts linked the attack to the Russian government more than...

President Trump went after Democrats in a pair of tweets Sunday morning, questioning why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) didn’t hand over a hacked server to the FBI. “What ever happened to the Server, at the center of so much Corruption, that the Democratic National Committee REFUSED to hand over to the hard charging (except in the case of Democrats) FBI?” Trump tweeted. Etc...

Attorneys for three Democratic National Committee hack victims urged a federal judge Thursday to allow a new investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia, alleging a "conspiracy" involving President Trump's associates. U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle considered the case on the first anniversary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which is looking into the same matter. The hearing, which took place in the same building where Mueller has witnesses testify to a grand jury, lasted nearly four hours, with the judge pressing each side on complicated jurisdictional and case law issues. The hearing began with about three dozen people...

Senior North Korean espionage official 'may have fled to Britain after defecting' By Julian Ryall, tokyo 3 MAY 2018 • 4:51AM North Korea has launched an international manhunt for one of its most senior counter-espionage officers, who disappeared in late February and is believed to have defected, possibly to Britain, according to a media report in South Korea. The official has been identified as a Mr Kang, a colonel in his 50s with the Ministry of State Security and responsible for monitoring dissident and espionage efforts in Russia, China and south-east Asia. He disappeared from the Zhongpu International Hotel in...

Harold Thomas Martin, a 51-year-old US National Security Agency contractor from Maryland, may be remembered as the second Edward Snowden, although there are many differences between the two cases. Martin, a former US Navy officer with top secret national security clearance, was arrested on Aug. 27 by the FBI and charged with the unauthorized removal and retention for many years of highly-sensitive classified documents. The purloined materials found in raids of his home and his car, which were described by as capable of causing “exceptionally grave damage” to US national security. Like Snowden, Martin worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, which...

The far-left Daily Beast says it has “hit pause” on Joy Reid’s columns until its own reporters have had a chance to investigate her claim that homophobic writings attributed to her were actually written by a hacker. In other fallout news, the embattled MSNBC anchor canceled a public appearance, a high-profile panel discussion she was set to appear on in New York. On top of that, a gay rights group abruptly canceled an award Reid was scheduled to receive next month. “We’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns,” wrote Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman in an internal email....

MSNBC host Joy Reid blamed hackers for placing homophobic remarks and jokes on her now-defunct blog between 2005 and 2007, but an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation and a cyber security expert raises serious doubts on the veracity of her claims. On April 19, left-wing Twitter user @Jamie_Maz resurfaced archived posts of Reid’s old blog, The Reid Report, showing her accusing prominent political figures of being gay, saying she was repulsed by the thought of sex between two gay men, and describing herself as “probably” homophobic. The posts were similar in substance to homophobic posts that Reid admitted...

Coercive thought reform practicing political groups, like the Communist Party USA as described in Bella Dodd's School of Darkness, can be thought of as cults. It's especially applicable considering the Stalinist Purge Trials in which disgraced party officials confessed to imaginary crimes, prior to execution.The cult-like political forces that are trying to force Catholic priests in Australia to give up the seal of confession, are perfectly capable of using secrets revealed in confession for political blackmail.Video by Margaret Thaler Singer, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and emeritus adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who counseled and interviewed more than...

Putin win in Landslide: Was there American Collection? Over 75%? Did America hack?

An analysis of leaked tools believed to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) provides a glimpse into the methods used by the organization to detect the presence of other state-sponsored actors on hacked devices, and it could help the cybersecurity community discover previously unknown threats. Over the past few years, a mysterious hacker group calling itself Shadow Brokers has been leaking tools allegedly created and used by the Equation Group, a threat actor widely believed to be linked to the NSA. The Shadow Brokers have been trying to sell Equation Group tools and exploits, but without...

NBC's Ken Dilanian reports the latest news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is assembling a case for criminal charges in the Russia probe.

BuzzFeed News sued the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Tuesday to force the release of information that the news outlet hopes will help it defend against a lawsuit related to the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed is seeking digital information that could shed light on the cyber attacks against the DNC during the presidential campaign. The news outlet faces three separate lawsuits related to its publication of the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC. The suit against the DNC seeks information that could help defend against a defamation lawsuit filed by...

After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials. The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was...

Last month, a local California newspaper left more than 19 million voter records exposed online. Gizmodo confirmed this week that the records were compromised during an apparent ransomware attack. The Sacramento Bee said in a statement that a firewall protecting its database was not restored during routine maintenance last month, leaving the 19,501,258 voter files publicly accessible. Additionally, the names, home addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers of 52,873 Sacramento Bee subscribers were compromised. “We take this incident seriously and have begun efforts to notify each of the individuals on the contact list and to provide them resources to help...

Smart TVs represent the lion’s share of new televisions. According to market research firm IHS Markit, 69 percent of all new sets shipped in North America in 2017 were internet-capable, and the percentage is set to rise in 2018. Eighty-two million of these sets have already found their way to consumers. Internet connectivity brings a lot of appealing functionality to modern televisions—including the ability to stream content through popular apps such as Hulu and Netflix, as well as to find content quickly using voice commands. But that functionality comes with substantial data collection. Smart TVs can identify every show you watch using...

Thieves have discovered a new way to exploit older ATM's into spitting out every dollar they hold. It's called jackpotting because of the speed of the bills flying out, resembling how slot machines used to pay out coins. The Secret Service has warned financial institutions to expect a wave of jackpotting over the next week to 10 days, based on its investigation of ATM crimes in several parts of the country. The U.S. appears to be the latest target. In 2016, jackpotting yielded $13 million from ATM's. Twelve European countries and Mexico have also been hit recently. Ahmed Banafa, from...

Hackers stole several hundred million dollars' worth of a lesser-known cryptocurrency from a major Japanese exchange Friday. Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange's NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translate of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare.

Dutch intelligence services had eyes and ears for years on the Russian outfit that hacked the Democratic National Committee, even infiltrating a surveillance camera at the Cozy Bear headquarters and recording hackers' faces, Dutch media reported. That trove of intelligence gathered by the Netherlands since 2014 has been crucial to the U.S. investigation into the Russian campaign influence operation, the reports from Nieuwsuur and Volkskrant said. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike reportedly first noticed the DNC hack by two Russian intelligence groups on June 14, 2016; CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch wrote in a blog post at the time that they were called...

Two Dutch intelligence services uncovered substantial evidence detailing how a Russian-backed hacking group infiltrated the Barack Obama White House, the U.S. Department of State, and the Democratic National Committee, according to a ground breaking report from broadcaster NOS and newspaper Volkskrant. The evidence was uncovered by a Dutch cyber defense team gained access to the "Cozy Bear" hacker group's systems, including a hallway security camera that allowed the Dutch team to maintain visual surveillance of the hackers.

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...