Free Republic

ORINDA — Laura Lyons was preparing food in her kitchen Sunday when the lazy afternoon took a turn for the absurd. A loud squawking — similar to the beginning of an emergency broadcast alert — blasted from the living room, the Orinda mother said, followed by a detailed warning of three North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to Los Angeles, Chicago and Ohio. “It warned that the United States had retaliated against Pyongyang and that people in the affected areas had three hours to evacuate,” Lyons said Monday. “It sounded completely legit, and it was loud and got our attention...

Former FISA court judge Reggie Walton is now under scrutiny due to evidence that Obama administration officials John Brennan and James Clapper hacked into Walton’s phone records in addition to the phone records of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and President Donald Trump before Trump ran for office. (READ: Evidence of the Walton Hack, and How Comey Covered It Up).Now we know that Walton has been on the bench in multiple fraudulent Deep State operations, including the Scooter Libby case, which also involved some of the main figures from the anti-Trump Operation Crossfire Hurricane plot. In the Libby case, then-deputy...

(This is 96 pages long so I am just posting the Executive Summary here) On September 7, 2017, Equifax announced a cybersecurity incident affecting 143 million consumers. This number eventually grew to 148 million—nearly half the U.S. population and 56 percent of American adults. This staff report explains the circumstances of the cyberattack against Equifax, one of the largest consumer reporting agencies (CRA) in the world. Equifax is one of several large CRAs in the United States. CRAs gather consumer data, analyze it to create credit scores and detailed reports, and then sell the reports to third parties. Consumers do...

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming to Washington, DC, on May 16 loaded for bear.  He has an ambitious agenda and apparently feels he can achieve it all because he holds “trump” cards against the President of the United States. Erdogan and his proxies have publicly said they want to convince the United States to jettison its budding alliance with the Syrian Democratic Union (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish group that has become the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS in Syria. On this point, they will encounter resistance...

<p>Iranian-backed hackers scrambled to break into the personal emails of US Treasury officials after harsh economic sanctions were placed on Tehran last month, a cyber security group said.</p> <p>The hacking group, named Charming Kitten, also targeted foreign nuclear experts in data tracked by Certfa analysts in the UK.</p>

The cyberattack on the Marriott hotel chain that collected passport information or other personal details of roughly 500 million guests was part of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort that hacked health insurers, other hotels and the security clearance files of millions more Americans, according to two people briefed on the preliminary results of the investigation. The hackers are suspected of working on behalf of the Ministry of State Security. The discovery comes as the Trump administration plans a series of actions targeting China’s trade, cyber and economic policies. The Justice Department is preparing to announce new indictments against Chinese hackers working...

The Times of Israel is reporting that a new computer virus 'more powerful' than the Stuxnet worm that devastated the Iranian nuclear weapons program in 2010 has been unleashed on Iran's "infrastructure and strategic systems." While the extent of the damage is unknown, the new virus has been described as “more violent, more advanced and more sophisticated" than Stuxnet. That virus, jointly developed by US and Israel, is believed to have set back the Iranian nuclear weapons programs by several months to several years depending on the source. The report came hours after Israel said its Mossad intelligence agency had...

Buying Used Voting Machines on eBay This is not surprising: This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines -- those that were used in the 2016 election -- are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as "next generation," and still in use today, are worse than they were before­ -- dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation. Cory Doctorow's comment is correct:

Georgia's secretary of state has launched an investigation into the Democratic Party over allegations of "possible cyber crimes" related to a hacking attack on the state's voting infrastructure. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp's office announced on Sunday that Democrat Stacey Abrams and her campaign will be investigated with less than 48 hours to go before Election Day.

Georgia's Secretary of State's office says it has launched an investigation into a "failed attempt to hack the state's voter registration system" on Saturday evening. The office of Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican candidate for governor, said in a Sunday morning news release that they will investigate the Georgia Democratic Party as part of its probe, but did not offer any details on why it is investigating the Democratic party. "While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes," said...

Brain implants used to treat Parkinson's disease could be hacked by cyber attackers and used to control people, scientists have claimed. A report by the Oxford Functional Neurosurgery Group and cyber security company Kaspersky claims that people's memories could be exploited by hackers and has called on cyber security companies, manufacturers and healthcare companies to develop new technology to stop them. Academics have previously warned that brain implants could prevent patients from "speaking or moving, cause irreversible damage to their brain, or even worse, be life-threatening". They claimed that hackers could overload or disable the system, and could damage...

The Justice Department on Tuesday unsealed charges against a group of Chinese intelligence officers, alleging that they hacked into a series of private companies’ computer systems in the U.S. and abroad as part of an effort to steal sensitive commercial aviation data. Zha Rong, Chai Meng and seven other co-conspirators worked to steal intellectual property and other sensitive data from over a dozen companies so that China could develop a turbofan engine "without incurring substantial research and development expenses," according to the to the indictment. "Members of the conspiracy targeted, among other things, companies in the aerospace and other high-technology...

(this story is 1 year old) Evidence shows that John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, was “hacked” by a Deep State surveillance operation overseen by Obama administration CIA director John Brennan and Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper. Roberts, the Bush appointee who made the decisive vote to uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare before the 2012 election, was allegedly the victim of the same Deep State surveillance program that spied on President Donald Trump. (continues at source)

ICANN has scheduled the Root Zone Key Signing Key (KSK) Rollover for today, and it could affect some DNS users all over the world. By Rolling the KSK, ICANN implies that a new cryptographic public and private key pair will be generated and the private key will be distributed to internet service providers, enterprise network administrators, and Domain Name System (DNS) resolver operators. KSK Rollover operations began in October 2016 and were scheduled for October 2017. However, ICANN announced that the rollover has been postponed due to the fact that “a significant number of resolvers used by Internet Service Providers...

Effective immediately I won't be using the free image hosting service called imgbb.com. Over the last 2 weeks I've noticed a HUGE increase in pop-up ads in my lower right hand corner of my monitor (whether I'm online or not all), many ads seem legitimate software upgrade offers, but others are invitations to date various women of Asian countries. These small pop-up ads all have the source listed as ibb.co, which I've discovered is originating from imgbb.com. With all of my image posts I may be spreading this same '3rd Party Cookie' advertisements to my fellow FReeper's, so I've decided...

We need to make our own hardware, now. Bloomberg/Business Week this morning broke the most disturbing spy story in years: Chinese cyber-spies embedded a secret back door onto computer motherboards intended for super-secret CIA cloud computing. The techies at Amazon Web Services discovered one particular back door in hardware built by Chinese subcontractors for Supermicro of San Jose, California, one of the world's biggest suppliers of motherboards.Bloomberg reports: Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to...

The coauthor of the Washington Post’s bombshell story on the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program is a long-time activist filmmaker who has railed against U.S. counterterrorism policies put into place after the Sept. 11 attacks. Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who shared the lead byline with former Post journalist Barton Gellman on the paper’s front-page NSA story, is not on the Post’s staff and is not a print reporter. Poitras has criticized the “illegal” Guantanamo Bay detention facility, described enhanced interrogation techniques as “legalized torture,” and criticized the intelligence community’s surveillance methods in her films and public comments. While traditional media...

Theft: The Chinese are the biggest thieves of U.S. technology, according to a new report, stealing hundreds of billions worth of data a year. The report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies warns Chinese cyber espionage is the “single greatest threat to U.S. technology,” draining more than $300 billion a year from the economy.

A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C. area hacked Hillary Clinton's private email server, gaining real-time access to her emails during her term as U.S. secretary of state. The Daily Caller reported this bombshell, corroborated by two sources. One might quibble about unnamed sources, but this is the new standard in journalism. CNN, NBC, the N.Y. Times, and the rest of the fakestream media regularly rely on anonymous sources for their anti-Trump stories. Apparently, the Chinese wrote code that they embedded into Clinton's home server in her Chappaqua home, which conveniently sent a copy of all of her emails...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012, hobbling U.S. spying operations in a massive intelligence breach whose origin has not been identified, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Investigators remain divided over whether there was a spy within the Central Intelligence Agency who betrayed the sources or whether the Chinese hacked the CIA's covert communications system, the newspaper reported, citing current and former U.S. officials.