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Smartwatch and wearables maker Garmin has shut down several of its services on July 23 to deal with a ransomware attack that has encrypted its internal network and some production systems. The company is currently planning a multi-day maintenance window to deal with the attack's aftermath, which includes shutting down its official website, the Garmin Connect user data-syncing service, Garmin's aviation database services, and even some production lines in Asia.

The Central Intelligence Agency conducted offensive cyber operations against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Russia’s intelligence agency FSB and other targets after President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 giving the agency broad power to undertake such actions, Yahoo News reported, citing former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The secret authorization — issued sometime in 2018 — offered the U.S. spy agency more freedom to both conduct cyber operations and choose its target, without the White House’s approval, the report said. The order effectively undid many of the restrictions that had previously been placed on...

<SNIP> For example, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center has 29,114 accounts, and each one includes a full name; rank; police department or agency; email address; home address,; cellphone number; supervisor’s name, rank, and email address; the IP address used to create the account; and a password hash — a cryptographic representation of the user’s password (hashed with 1,000 iterations of PBKDF2 and a 24-byte salt, if you’re that kind of nerd). If a user’s password is weak, hackers with access to its hash could crack it to recover the original password, potentially leading to a giant list of all...

For a few moments last night, Twitter was, blissfully, free from the musings of the blue check brigade. If you don't know what this club is you're rather fortunate as the blue check brigade is the gaggle of people you're to believe are more important than you, as evidenced by the small blue checkmarks that appear beside their Twitter handles. A confession: I am a member of the club insofar as I have a checkmark, as does my gracious host Mark Steyn. Though philosophically I'm relieved to be on the outside of this in-crowd. Blue-checked accounts were locked down by...

First Federal Criminal Jury Trial Conducted In Bay Area Since COVID-19 Shutdown SAN FRANCISCO – Yevgeniy Nikulin was convicted today by a federal jury for hacking into LinkedIn, DropBox, and the social networking company formerly known as Formspring, announced United States Attorney David L. Anderson and FBI Special Agent in Charge John L. Bennett.The jury found that Nikulin hacked into computers belonging to LinkedIn, DropBox and Formspring, damaged computers belonging to LinkedIn and Formspring by installing malware on them, stole the usernames and passwords for employees at LinkedIn and Formspring, and sold and conspired with others to sell the...

Israel was responsible for two blasts at Iranian facilities — one related to uranium enrichment, the other for missile production — over the past week, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported Friday. The Al-Jareeda daily cited an unnamed senior source as saying that an Israeli cyberattack caused a fire and explosion at the largely underground Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in the predawn hours of Thursday morning. According to the source, this was expected to set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by approximately two months. The newspaper also reported that last Friday Israeli F-35 stealth fighter jets bombed a site located in the...

An official timeline of the Office of Personnel Management breach obtained by FCW pinpoints the hackers' calibrated extraction of data and the government's step-by-step response. It illuminates a sequence of events that lawmakers have struggled to pin down in public hearings with Obama administration officials. The timeline makes clear that the heist of data on 22 million current and former federal employees was one sustained assault rather than two separate intrusions to steal background investigation data and personnel records. The document, which bears the seals of OPM and the Department of Homeland Security, is dated July 14 and was prepared...

On Friday June 19 a trove of 269GB of data was posted to the internet by a group calling itself 'Distributed Denial of Secrets'. The link above leads to a popular Twitter hashtag on this topic. What was leaked were secret law enforcement documents that detail numerous practices of law enforcement. A lot of this is really scary police state stuff like some people here on FR post. Things like how Google keeps user files on all Google users and then passes them to law enforcement. License plate readers are used to track activists left and right. Nevada police used...

On Monday, a Texas civil rights attorney launched a clemency petition for National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner in Dallas. The attorney, Alison Grinter, encountered Winner through Crystal Mason, a Texas mother who served time alongside Winner in a Fort Worth federal prison after receiving a five-year sentence for “illegal voting” in the 2016 presidential election. Mason and Winner became friends in the facility’s newsroom, where they spent long hours watching TV news and debating current events. After hearing about Winner from Mason, Grinter began corresponding with the whistleblower’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, on Twitter. Last year, the two women drove...

Who In The Hell Hired NSA Leaker Reality Leigh Winner After Her Twitter Rants?

The stolen document is basically useless . . . but where is this Winner located? Hmmm Georgia? Georgia election officials accuse DHS of hacking state computer system. Georgia was one of only two states refuse help from the DHS in securing the elections noticed they were hacked and the hack came from within the Department of Homeland Security and they called it out.

Cheektowaga, NY (WBEN) Cheektowaga Police have made an arrest in a case of threats made through the emergency frequency. Police say transmissions included threats to commit shootings inside a retail establishment in the Town of Cheektowaga. The break in the case came when a Patrolman heard a transmission and noticed Jonathan Robert’s vehicle nearby. After investigation, a radio capable of transmitting on the Cheektowaga Police Department’s frequency was located in Roberts' vehicle and his voice matched that of a recording from threats made in May. Roberts was arranged by Erie County Court Judge Calvo-Torres and released on his own recognizance....

In mid-April, a senior FBI official warned that cyber spies were attacking U.S. and allied medical research institutions developing coronavirus vaccines. The U.S. Department of Justice later pegged China as the chief witch doctor of medical espionage and suggested a crash American COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine project nicknamed Operation Warp Speed is Beijing's major target. During World War II, American leaders feared Nazi Germany sought a nuclear weapons program. So at warp speed, the Manhattan Project split atoms in an experimental reactor and then developed and deployed operational atomic bombs. The "crash" Manhattan Project gave the U.S. and its allies a...

Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American citizen who helped establish a pro-Tehran lobbying group in America, has been arrested in Iran and imprisoned indefinitely. -excerpt- Namazi has been described as one of the “intellectual architects” of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group that has been accused of working in support of the regime in Tehran. He and NIAC Director Trita Parsi founded the organization as a way to continuously lobby for the removal of sanctions against Iran and to promote Iran’s foreign policy, while combating the pro-Israel sentiment in America, according to documents from a Cyprus convention...

As American researchers are working hard to develop a vaccine and a cure for the Chinese coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, Chinese Communist Party hackers are targeting American research for cyberattacks, according to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Rogue actors have increased cybertheft and attacks amid the coronavirus pandemic. “China’s long history of bad behavior in cyberspace is well documented, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone they are going after the critical organizations involved in the nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Christopher Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told The New York...

Unknown activists have posted nearly 25,000 email addresses and passwords allegedly belonging to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation and other groups working to combat the coronavirus pandemic, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism and terrorist groups. While SITE was unable to verify whether the email addresses and passwords were authentic, the group said the information was released Sunday and Monday and almost immediately used to foment attempts at hacking and harassment by far-right extremists. An Australian cybersecurity expert, Robert Potter, said he was able to verify that the WHO...

I dont know where to post this here. Figure people would be interested. The fun starts on page 158

As the video conferencing platform Zoom has grown in popularity during the novel coronavirus pandemic, so have instances of “Zoom bombing.” Zoom bombing is when someone joins your meeting and disrupts it in some way. Create a unique ID Instead of using the personal meeting ID Zoom assigns when you create an account, pcmag.com recommends you instead generate a unique code. Create a waiting room By creating a waiting room, the host and/or co-hosts can control who joins a meeting. The “waiting room” option can be found under account settings. Once enabled, the host can either put everyone in the...

I won't name the source, but Fort Worth ISD has suffered a serious data breach, and the main computer system could be down until after spring break. Got kids or a spouse in Fort Worth ISD? Watch your bank accounts or personal files.

The FBI arrested suspected hacker Arthur Dam in connection with cyberattacks he allegedly carried out during the 2018 Democratic congressional primary that ultimately nominated former Rep. Katie Hill, D-Calif., who he was found to have ties to, according to a criminal complaint filed on Wednesday. Special Agent Elliot Weideman, who works with the Computer Intrusion Squad in the Bureau's Los Angeles field office, accused Dam of "intentionally damaging and attempting to damage a protected computer." He also claimed Dam was involved in four cyberattacks that disrupted the website of Hill's primary opponents. One of the victims saw their website go...