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MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS This morning, I was inundated with e-mails and inquiries about Cyber Polygon 2021. Many listeners asked if I would do a follow-up on whether or not the gathering put together by the World Economic Forum gave us any news about what is going to happen to the supply chain if there is a major hack or data breach. However, there is more to the story. Part one of the gathering was broadcast virtually and after watching some of the proceedings, I came away feeling as if their simulation did go real time – the problem...

ox News host Tucker Carlson was mocked on social media this week for stating that he had been told that the National Security Agency was reading his private emails and spying on him. The usual suspects called Carlson paranoid, because there are so many checks and balances to assure the feds would never illegally target a vexatious Biden critic. However, on Tuesday, a dissent by Travis LeBlanc, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, revealed that one of the NSA’s most intrusive surveillance engines, XKeyscore, may be violating federal law and Americans’ rights and privacy. In...

National Guardsmen just completed a two-week training exercise which saw them respond to a simulated cyberattack that took out critical utilities across the United States. The exercises have become an annual event, but this year took on even more significance after coming on the heels of several major ransomware and cyber attacks that crippled large parts of American infrastructure in recent months. The exercises were part of the seventh Cyber Yankee, an training event that brings together guardsmen from throughout the New England region to test their responses against simulated cyberattacks. This year’s exercises simulated a cyber attack that targeted...

As details of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva have been disclosed, President Biden professed himself "stumped by some of the criticism I've received for what I and Joe Scarborough agree was the most successful summit meeting in world history." The most serious criticism of Biden's actions at the summit was tied to the list of 16 crucial targets for cyber attacks that he handed to Putin. Rebecca Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, asked "since when is it a good idea to give an adversary a list of vital targets? From one perspective, it...

The seizure of funds paid by Colonial Pipeline to a Russian hacker ring, DarkSide, marks the first recovery by a new ransomware Justice Department task force.

The Supreme Court has ruled that a police officer who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash did not violate U.S. hacking laws. The landmark ruling concludes a long-running case that clarifies the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, by putting limits on what kind of conduct can be prosecuted. The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Nathan Van Buren, a former Georgia police sergeant who brought the case. Van Buren was prosecuted on two counts, one for accepting a kickback for accessing the database as a serving police officer, and another for...

JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier, has been hit with a major cyber attack.The attack has reportedly crippled the meat giant, which controls about 20% of the U.S. beef and pork slaughtering capacity.As a result of the attack, large US and Canadian meat plants canceled shifts Tuesday, threatening to disrupt meat supply and further inflate food prices.The White House has contacted major meat processors across the US to notify them of the incident and assess “any impact on supply,” principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said aboard Air Force One. She added that the FBI is investigating the hacking.“The president...

Some 150 people protesting mask orders and other coronavirus restrictions in Winnipeg, Canada this evening... the case against Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary, Alberta dropped... A "mask off" student walkout at Prairie High School in Vancouver, Washington today over the school order to wear masks... Tonight vaccination in the US reaching new milestones with "partial vaccination" reaching just over 50 percent of the nation's population and the "full vaccinated" moving over the 40 percent... The biggest vaccination lottery yet announced in California... "When the Democrat Party is applauding your actions, especially in a state like Idaho,...

In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian. So many readers had questions in response to the tweet that I thought it was worth a blog post exploring this one weird cyber defense trick.The Twitter thread came up in a discussion on the ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline, which earlier this month...

Microsoft has issued an alert over a remote access tool (RAT) dubbed RevengeRAT that it says has been used to target aerospace and travel sectors with spear-phishing emails. RevengeRAT, also known as AsyncRAT, is being distributed via carefully crafted email messages that prompt employees to open a file masquerading as an Adobe PDF file attachment that in fact downloads a malicious visual basic (VB) file. Security firm Morphisec recently flagged the two RATs as part of a sophisticated Crypter-as-a-Service that delivers multiple RAT families.SEE: Network security policy (TechRepublic Premium)According to Microsoft, the phishing emails distribute a loader that then delivers...

CHAMBLEE, Ga. - More than 1,000 gas stations in the Southeast reported running out of fuel, primarily because of what analysts say is unwarranted panic-buying among drivers, as the shutdown of a major pipeline by a gang of hackers entered its fifth day Tuesday. Government officials acted swiftly to waive safety and environmental rules to speed the delivery of fuel by truck, ship or rail to motorists and airports, even as they sought to assure the public that there was no cause for alarm. Sponsored Links Video from our partners Brought to you by Taboola Forget the 30yr mortgage if...

The DarkSide hacker gang that is responsible for the devastating Colonial Pipeline attack this weekend is a relatively new group, but cybersecurity analysts already know enough about them to determine just how dangerous they are. According to Boston-based Cybereason, DarkSide is an organized group of hackers set up along the “ransomware as a service” business model, meaning the DarkSide hackers develop and market ransomware hacking tools, and sell them to other criminals who then carry out attacks. Think of it as the evil twin of a Silicon Valley software start-up. Bloomberg first reported that DarkSide may be involved in the...

WASHINGTON—At least two groups of China-linked hackers have spent months using a previously undisclosed vulnerability in virtual private networking devices to spy on the U.S. defense industry, researchers and the devices’ manufacturer said. Utah-based IT company Ivanti said in a statement on April 20 the hackers took advantage of the flaw in its Pulse Connect Secure suite to break into the systems of “a very limited number of customers.” Ivanti said that while mitigations are in place, a fix for the issue would be unavailable until early May. Ivanti provided no details about who might be responsible for the espionage...

ABC 4 reporter Jason Nguyen personally visited the home of a Utah paramedic who donated $10 to the legal defense fund of Kyle Rittenhouse to “get the paramedics [sic] side of things”:

*snip*...every time I read a story that says a “data breach’ is being weaponized for political benefit, my immediate reaction is now to dismiss the oft claimed “hackers” and focus on the most likely source of privacy weaponization: the known and intentional intrusion by government officials and contractors.

A cyberattack on Microsoft Corp.’s Exchange email software is believed to have infected tens of thousands of businesses, government offices and schools in the U.S., according to people briefed on the matter. Many of those victims of the attack, which Microsoft has said was carried out by a network of suspected Chinese hackers, appear to be small businesses and state and local governments. Estimates of total world-wide victims were approximate and ranged broadly as of Friday. Tens of thousands of customers appear to have been affected, but that number could be larger, the people said. It could be higher than...

Cybersecurity group FireEye said Thursday it found evidence that hackers linked to the Chinese regime exploited a flaw in a Microsoft email application to go after a number of American targets, including a university and local governments. FireEye analysts wrote in a blog post that the company built “higher-fidelity detections” and launched multiple threat hunting campaigns after Microsoft confirmed earlier this week that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as “Hafnium” had exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Exchange Server email program. Using its array of detection methods and tools, FireEye found that “the activity reported by Microsoft aligns with our observations”...

Free speech social media platform Gab was attacked in a coordinated hacking operation sometime this weekend, with malicious actors briefly compromising accounts of prominent users of the platform.Gab founder Andrew Torba disclosed the cyberattack, revealing that left-wing operatives had sought to compromise both his own Gab account and an archive account reserved for President Donald Trump. The attack compromised Trump’s reserved account minutes before the President was slated to speak on-stage at CPAC- with the timing suggesting the President may announce he’s joining the free speech social media service.Trending: Wikipedia’s Founder is Creating New Free Speech Competitor to Website, Citing...

The gist of the Congressional inquiry into the role NSA may have played in manipulating the U.S. civilian government technical standards development and approval process is not the first time the legislative branch of government has smelled a rat when it comes to NSA inserting “Trojan horses” into standards developed for civilian government and commercial use. In the case of Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA’s zeal in providing itself with a hidden back door to spy on targeted computers and networks relying on the NIST standard may have boomeranged. Back doors of any nature in information technology products is a hack waiting to...

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense found thousands of its computer servers sending military network data to China — the result of code hidden in chips that handled the machines’ startup process. In 2014, Intel Corp. discovered that an elite Chinese hacking group breached its network through a single server that downloaded malware from a supplier’s update site. And in 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned multiple companies that Chinese operatives had concealed an extra chip loaded with backdoor code in one manufacturer's servers.