Free Republic

As we enter 2020, it appears all too obvious that information warfare (IW) across the globe will worsen. Federal officials expect new attacks for the 2020 elections and have now warned Moscow that they will retaliate if such attacks do occur. Interference in elections, however, is not a Russia only affair. China has interfered in Taiwan's and other Asian elections and is conducting a large, well-funded campaign to insert itself into U.S. media even as it conducts massive influence operations here and globally. Although several worthwhile initiatives have been launched to counter Russian and other cyber and information warfare, the...

If you’re a law enforcement official who has more allegiance to ideology than to the law or to the country, where does that get you? For former FBI analyst Mark Tolson, the answer is jail — however briefly. Tolson is best-known — if he’s known at all — as the man who broke into a pro-Trump operative’s email account in October 2018, took screen-shots of some of the messages, then sent images to a reporter and offered the reporter the password, according to Politico. The unnamed member of the media turned down the opportunity. Tolson, 60, said he did it...

The Mueller investigation is over but the fallout continues. An FBI analyst was apparently so eager to protect Mueller that he hacked the email of a political enemy. We will probably be hearing stories like this for months if not years. Townhall reports: ICYMI: An FBI Analyst Is Going to Prison for Illegal Email Hacking of a Political Enemy…to Protect Mueller While U.S. Attorney John Durham continues his criminal investigation into FISA abuse and other misconduct at the FBI, CIA, DIA and other federal government intelligence agencies, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller allies was just sentenced to prison. Mark...

Holly Kay bought eight $1,000 Macy’s gift cards at a California mall because a scammer told her to on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Forty minutes later, she bought $13,000 more in gift cards at that store. The ease with which Ms. Kay was able to complete those purchases underscores the growing popularity of gift cards among scammers seeking quick, hard-to-trace ways to take money from their victims. Buying multiple gift cards is often easier than initiating a wire transfer, because the cards are easily purchased and the numbers can be sent instantly by phone or text message to a fraudster...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, December 18, 2019 Member of “The Dark Overlord” Hacking Group Extradited From United Kingdom to Face Charges in St. Louis Defendant Conspired to Steal Sensitive Personally Identifying Information from Victim Companies and Release those Records on Criminal Marketplaces unless Victims Paid Bitcoin Ransoms A United Kingdom national appeared today in federal court on charges of aggravated identity theft, threatening to damage a protected computer, and conspiring to commit those and other computer fraud offenses, related to his role in a computer hacking collective known as “The Dark Overlord,”...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, December 5, 2019 Russian National Charged with Decade-Long Series of Hacking and Bank Fraud Offenses Resulting in Tens of Millions in Losses and Second Russian National Charged with Involvement in Deployment of “Bugat” Malware Reward of up to $5 Million Offered for Information Leading to Arrest or Conviction The United States of America, through its Departments of Justice and State, and the United Kingdom, through its National Crime Agency (NCA), today announced the unsealing of criminal charges in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Lincoln, Nebraska, against Maksim V. Yakubets, aka...

Ohio detected and thwarted an election-related cyber attack earlier this month, the state’s elections chief said. Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said the “relatively unsophisticated” hacking attempt on Nov. 5, which was Election Day, originated in Panama but was traced to a Russian-owned company. LaRose told The Columbus Dispatch Tuesday that the would-be attackers were looking around for vulnerabilities in his office’s website. “They are poking around for soft spots,” LaRose said. The ultimate goal of such attacks is disrupting and undermining the credibility of elections, but LaRose said Ohio’s election results are safe because neither the election machines...

In the last few days, media talking heads have been saying the word "CrowdStrike" a lot, defining it as a wild conspiracy theory originating in Moscow. They were joined by Chris Wallace at Fox News, who informed us that president Trump and his ill-informed fans believe in a crazy idea that the DNC wasn't hacked by the Russians but by some Ukrainian group named CrowdStrike that stole the DNC server and brought it to Ukraine , and that it was Ukraine that meddled in our 2016 election and not Russia. A crazy idea indeed. Except that neither Trump nor his...

After Trump secured the nomination, Obama's people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down. It was always going to come down to this. One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government. A few weeks after the election, I warned that...

BREAKING: Senate investigators looking into whether a DNC operative who worked w Clinton campaign & Ukraine Embassy to dig up dirt on Trump campaign, originated the Russia-hacked-the-DNC conspiracy theory & poss misled FBI. Senate seeks FBI 302s & imaging of laptop of Ali Chalupa

During the Democrat’s sham impeachment inquiry this week, Republican Congressman Deven Nunes brought up the name Alexandra Chalupa several times. Alexandra “Ali” Chalupa is a Democratic National Committee operative linked to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and fake “whistleblower” / CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. However even the usually well-informed Rep. Nunes seems to have missed one of the biggest bombshells of the Democrat’s 2016 election interference that’s been hiding in plain sight: Chalupa’s admission she was involved in a plot to scan a number of state’s voting systems with Obama’s Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security in what Chalupa...

Breitbart at Rep. Weiner's press conference. Published on Jun 6, 2011 In Full: Andrew Breitbart came forward at Rep. Anthony Weiner's New York City press conference to defend himself against allegations claiming he hacked the congressman's Twitter account.

When Mike Carpenter learned Google’s latest acquisition would be Fitbit, the maker of a device he wore at all hours of the day except in the shower, he left his Fitbit Charge 3 on the table at his office where he was working that day. He, and others like him, haven’t picked it up since. On Nov. 1, Google said would be buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion in hopes of boosting its hardware business getting a foothold in the health space. Google explicitly said in the announcing the deal that it won’t sell users' personal or health data. Despite that...

Democrat Sen. Mark Warner (VA) said during an interview this week that President Donald Trump deserves credit for allowing the United States to “punch back” at and use its “offensive capabilities” against Russia’s cyber attacks. He also noted that Trump has made it a lot easier to take action against Russia than former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made the remarks on PBS’s “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” which aired on Friday. “There are two main issues: There is the integrity of the election infrastructure, and then there’s the...

Full Title: Former Operator of Illegal Booter Services Sentenced for Conspiracy to Commit Computer Damage and Abuse Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, November 15, 2019 An Orland Park, Illinois, resident was sentenced yesterday to 13 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release on one count of conspiracy to cause damage to internet-connected computers for his role in owning, administering and supporting illegal booter services that launched millions of illegal denial of service, or DDoS, attacks against victim computer systems in the United States and elsewhere. Chief U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle...

A Russian national made his initial appearance in federal court today on charges related to his alleged operation of two websites devoted to the facilitation of payment card fraud, computer hacking, and other crimes.Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Special Agent in Charge Matthew S. Miller of the U.S. Secret Service’s Washington Field Office made the announcement.Aleksei Burkov, 29, arrived at Dulles International Airport this morning after being extradited from Israel.  The indictment unsealed today charges Burkov with wire fraud, access...

The 20-something couple with a history of small-time scams had inadvertently hacked the world’s most powerful nation for a five-figure ransom at a time of high anxiety over national security on Inauguration Day. The Romanians had launched hundreds of thousands of emails embedded with ransomware in an attachment disguised as an invoice, authorities said. The list of email addresses they bought included, by chance, the Washington, D.C., police department. A recipient there apparently took the bait, opening the attachment that locked up the street-camera system. Only a payment could produce the key. Ms. Cismaru sent a message to the Journal...

A father Googled ‘Nest + camera + hacked’ and found out that this happens frequently It was an unremarkable Wednesday afternoon when our nanny texted my wife and me asking if we were speaking through one of the Nest cameras in our house. We both replied that we were not.Then the nanny texted that a voice was coming through the kitchen camera and using bad words.I immediately pulled up the video feed and began reviewing:Related Articles How Nest, designed to keep intruders out of people’s homes, effectively allowed hackers to get in I hear the familiar chime, which means someone...

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/289290-jeff-bezos-neil-degrasse-tyson-join-pentagon-innovation-board July 26, 2016 - 02:15 PM EDT Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jeff Bezos join DOD innovation board By Rebecca Kheel Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson were among the big names Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Tuesday as joining the Pentagon’s recently formed Defense Innovation Advisory Board. “I've given them the very specific task of identifying innovative private sector best practices that could be of use to DOD [the Department of Defense] — not unlike our recent Hack the Pentagon pilot program, which invited hackers to help find vulnerabilities in our networks," Carter said during an...

No wonder the Dems are nervous: The alleged Russian hacking of the DNC’s computers is proving to be a Hillary campaign and DNC scam that went unchallenged by Messrs. Comey and Mueller. In his telephone conversation with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump requested Ukraine’s help in getting “to the bottom of” the Russian collusion narrative and the role of CrowdStrike, a private computer security company, in propagating that story. Lost in the volcanic eruption of faux outrage and condemnation aimed at the president by the Democrats and their wholly owned media subsidiary, this reference to CrowdStrike indicates that the...