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A British man hailed as a hero for stopping a global cyber-attack that was threatening the NHS has pleaded guilty to US malware charges. Marcus Hutchins, 24, has pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware - or malicious software - court documents show. Writing on his website, Hutchins said he regretted his actions and accepted "full responsibility for my mistakes". Hutchins has been held in the US since he was arrested by the FBI in 2017. "As you may be aware, I've pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to my career...

Technology theft and other unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe, and they expect that figure to grow. Yet an investigation by NPR and FRONTLINE into why three successive administrations failed to stop cyberhacking from China found an unlikely obstacle for the government — the victims themselves. In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money...

The problem of China hacking US businesses and stealing intellectual property has been going on for decades. But when it comes to fighting the crime wave from China, the US government has been hampered by a lack of cooperation from the victims. An investigation by National Public Radio and PBS found that fear of losing profits has driven the silence from US companies who see rocking the boat as more of a threat to their livelihood than taking strong action. In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, April 11, 2019 WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Computer Hacking Conspiracy ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Julian P. Assange, 47, the founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested today in the United Kingdom pursuant to the U.S./UK Extradition Treaty, in connection with a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer. According to court documents unsealed today, the charge relates to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States. The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged...

Tesla is the first automaker to participate in a Pwn2Own hacking event, which is run by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). The event happened in Vancouver this week and a team of two hackers managed to find an exploit on the last day of competition. Over the past 4 years, Tesla has been running a bug bounty program and according to sources familiar with the effort, the company has given away hundreds of thousands in rewards to hackers who exposed vulnerabilities in its system

For years security professionals and election integrity activists have been pushing voting machine vendors to build more secure and verifiable election systems, so voters and candidates can be assured election outcomes haven’t been manipulated. Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking. The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O14gv2uJC9s Lou Dobbs Tonight 3/12/19 Breaking Fox News March 12, 2019 David Asman from Fox Business Network was in for Lou with informative guests on China's devious and dangerous behavior.

A function of Intel's processors dealing with speculative execution has another vulnerability that affects all Intel-based computers including Apple's Mac, researchers have revealed, with "Spoiler" potentially allowing an attacker the ability to view the layout of memory, and in turn potentially access sensitive data stored in those locations. The speculative execution function of Intel's processors, used to increase the performance of a CPU by predicting paths an instruction will go through before the branch is completed, is a useful function but one that has caused Intel issues in the past. A new report from security researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute...

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...