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Over the last six years American Internet security researchers have come to realize that much of the data stolen by Chinese hackers could be obtained, without breaking any laws, from commercial data brokers. While “data privacy” is often a major political issue few of these prominent critics seemed to realize that most of this data was available from commercial firms long before the government began building their own computerized personnel databases, which were subsequently stolen by foreign hackers. Collecting such data for commercial purposes has been going on for over a century. American firms pioneered the business of selling to...

Without warning, Facebook crashed on Monday morning.It’s unclear what caused today’s global outage which saw Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all crash.The shutdown comes after a former Facebook product manager turned “whistleblower” leaked tens of thousands of internal documents published in a blockbuster series of reports published by The Wall Street Journal.Facebook executives admit in the internal memos that Zuckerberg “hobbled” America to get vaccinated, facilitates human trafficking and that the company’s subsidiary, Instagram, is harmful to teenagers among the trove of damning information leaked.However, the whistleblower, 37-year old data scientist Frances Haugen who led Facebook’s Civic Integrity and Misinformation Group...

President Barack Obama reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in October that directly interfering with the U.S. election could result in an "armed conflict." According to NBC News, Obama opted to use the red phone to contact Moscow directly, a communication system that dates back to the Cold War. It's not an actual telephone, but instead sends a secure email message between the two countries. "International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace," part of the Oct. 31 message read, according to NBC. "We will hold Russia to those standards."

Hackers stole from the accounts of at least 6,000 customers of Coinbase Global Inc, according to a breach notification letter sent by the cryptocurrency exchange to affected customers.The hack took place between March and May 20 of this year, according to a copy of the letter posted on the website of California’s Attorney General.Unauthorized third parties exploited a flaw in the company’s SMS account recovery process to gain access to the accounts, and transfer funds to crypto wallets not associated with Coinbase, the company said.“We immediately fixed the flaw and have worked with these customers to regain control of their...

Earlier this year, researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky witnessed a cyberespionage campaign targeting Microsoft Windows PCs at government and telecom entities in China and Pakistan. They began in June 2020 and continued through to April 2021. What piqued the researchers’ interest was the hacking software used by the digital spies, whom Kaspersky had dubbed Bitter APT, a pseudonym for an unspecified government agency. Aspects of the code looked like some the Moscow antivirus provider had previously seen and attributed to a company it gave the cryptonym “Moses.” Moses, said Kaspersky, was a mysterious provider of hacking tech known as...

Three former U.S. intelligence and military officials have agreed to pay $1.7 million to the U.S. government and admitted to providing hacking technology to the United Arab Emirates, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday.Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke made the admission as part of a first-of-its-kind deferred prosecution agreement, under which they are also to pay $1.68 million, cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation, cut ties with UAE intelligence and give up their security clearances. The Justice Department agreed to drop the prosecution if the three men comply with the terms for three years.Lawyers for Adams and...

T-Mobile continues to investigate a data breach from the past week that compromised the personal information of tens of millions people, and not just active subscribers. The data includes names, driver's license numbers, Social Security numbers and device identification (IMEI and IMSI) numbers for subscribers, former customers, and prospective customers who may have been interested in T-Mobile service at one point. And the breach includes customers of Metro by T-Mobile too. That means almost anyone who has given their information to T-Mobile could be affected.

THE US has been targeted by a cyber attack in a "possible serious breach", according to sources. Fox News' White House Correspondent Jacquie Heinrich tweeted: "The State Department has been hit by a cyber attack, and notifications of a possible serious breach were made by the Department of Defense Cyber Command. "It is unclear when the breach was discovered, but it is believed to have happened a couple weeks ago. "A source familiar tells Fox the State Department’s ongoing mission to evacuate Americans and allied refugees in Afghanistan “have not been affected”. "The extent of the breach, investigation into the...

There is a lot of noise around mRNA Vax but there is something very important that is not being discussed- and I know personally for good reason. I work in IT and as a programmer writing code, algorithms for AI machine learning, and more recent projects in the brain sciences in biotech fields. I made a point early on to become a shareholder of Moderna one of the leading C19 gene therapy manufacturers because I wanted to have interaction with their scientists and participate in shareholder calls. I did this so I could ask questions directly to verify the concerns...

Female journalists and activists say they had their private photos shared on social media by governments seeking to intimidate and silence them. Ghada Oueiss, a Lebanese broadcast journalist at Al-Jazeera, was eating dinner at home with her husband last June when she received a message from a colleague telling her to check Twitter. Oueiss opened up the account and was horrified: A private photo taken when she was wearing a bikini in a jacuzzi was being circulated by a network of accounts, accompanied by false claims that the photos were taken at her boss’s house. Over the next few days...

Before pillow magnate Mike Lindell burst onto the political scene with his election audit mantra, the idea was popularized by a powerful left-wing think tank. A 2017 policy paper reveals the Center for American Progress stood foursquare behind the idea of “robust election audits,” The National Pulse can today reveal.The 21-page document entitled “9 Solutions to Secure America’s Elections” was written by Danielle Root and Liz Kennedy and published on August 16, 2017.At the time, the political left was attempting to convince Americans that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president, and that Russian election interference had swayed the 2016 election...

Anybody remember the bluster Joe Biden emitted when he 'confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin' over Russian hacking at his June 16 Geneva summit?“I made it very clear to him that the United States expects, when a ransomware operation is coming from his soil even though it’s not sponsored by the state, we expect them to act if we give them enough information to act on who that is,” Biden told reporters.Tough, tough, tough. And as far as public knowledge goes, it's not completely certain that the Russian state even organized the Russian criminal hacks. But they were held responsible, and...

The Biden administration today formally blamed China for the hack that took place in March of Microsoft Exchange servers and said the actions involved criminal hackers who have carried out other ransomware and cyber-attack operations as well, holding people up for millions of dollars. The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre said the groups also targeted maritime industries and naval defense contractors in the U.S. and Europe and the Finnish parliament, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the hacking was “conducted from the territory of China for the purpose of intellectual property theft and espionage.”So now that the Biden Administration...

Update (1310ET): Despite Beijing's threat to retaliate against the US if it imposes new sanctions or - worse still - attempts to retaliate with a cyber-offensive of its own, the Biden Administration just released a statement saying it reserves the right to take additional unilateral action. And although it hasn't ruled out unilateral action, it would prefer to act in concert with its international allies.* * *Update (1230ET): Beijing has just responded to the latest allegations by the Biden Administration and its "coalition of allies." In an editorial published by the English language Global Times, the pro-government paper blasted the...

The hitmen came for Cecilio Pineda Birto as he swung in a hammock at a carwash, waiting for his pickup to be cleaned. The 38-year-old freelance reporter was shot dead ... A few hours earlier, Pineda had in a broadcast on Facebook Live accused state police and local politicians of colluding with a violent local capo known as El Tequilero. In previous weeks, Pineda had received a string of anonymous death threats. At about the same time, his mobile phone number was selected as a possible target for surveillance by a Mexican client of the spyware company NSO Group. A...

WASHINGTON — A new joint effort made up of NATO member states, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Japan is coming together to confront the global threat posed by Chinese state-sponsored cyberattacks. In its first action on Monday, the countries will publicly blame China’s Ministry of State Security for a massive cyberattack on Microsoft Exchange email servers earlier this year. The attack was carried out by criminal contract hackers working for the MSS who also engage in cyber-enabled extortion, cryptojacking and ransomware, the official said. The group will share intelligence on cyberthreats and collaborate on network defenses and security,...

It is the name for perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed – certainly by a private company. Once it has wormed its way on to your phone, without you noticing, it can turn it into a 24-hour surveillance device. It can copy messages you send or receive, harvest your photos and record your calls. It might secretly film you through your phone’s camera, or activate the microphone to record your conversations. It can potentially pinpoint where you are, where you’ve been, and who you’ve met. Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware – that is developed,...

A Connecticut teen has been charged with computer crimes after police say he hacked into his school's database and referenced a quote from Adolf Hitler in a high school yearbook. Hollister Tryon, 18, was a student at Glastonbury High School, where the quote appeared in May beneath the photo of an unsuspecting classmate, police said. It read, 'It is a quite special secret pleasure how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them.' The quote was attributed in the yearbook to George Floyd, the Black man killed by Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin last May....

Fran Finnegan was on vacation in New York just before the Fourth of July weekend when he received a disturbing text message from one of his customers: How come his website was down? Finnegan quickly searched out a computer to remotely examine his site, which provides access to millions of documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. There he discovered a disaster unfolding in front of his eyes in real time. Hackers had breached his site’s security and had taken over. He watched helplessly as they encrypted all his files, placing them beyond reach. “As soon as I could,...