Free Republic

The leak of high-classified U.S. intelligence documents to the Iranian regime last week has triggered a much-needed counter-intelligence investigation to identify the source -- either a mole who has betrayed their country, or a cyber-hack. The documents, which bore Top Secret/NOFORN and compartmented intelligence headers, described U.S. satellite spying on Israeli airfields as the IDF conducted exercises believed to foreshadow a massive airstrike on Iran. The NOFORN designation means that the document cannot be shared with foreign nationals other than members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing arrangement the United States has crafted with the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee overseeing technology issues will hold a hearing Tuesday on Chinese hacking incidents, including a recent incident involving American telecom companies. The hearing to be chaired by Senator Richard Blumenthal will review the threats "Chinese hacking and influence pose to our democracy, national security, and economy," his office said, adding the senator plans "to raise concerns about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest with China as Mr. Musk becomes increasingly involved in government affairs." Musk, the head of electric car company Tesla, social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX, emerged during the election...

On December 9 and 10, 2016, the New York Times and the Washington Post independently reported that anonymous senior intelligence officials had told them that, based on intercepted communications, the intelligence agencies agreed that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee to help Donald Trump win the election. Their evidence was the fact of their access to U.S communications intelligence. A flood of subsequent stories also cited allegations by “senior intelligence officials” that “intercepted communications” and “intercepted calls” showed that “members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials...

In December 2023, for 17 continuous days, a fleet of drones appeared at night over Langley Air Force Base (AFB), Virginia and other facilities in the greater Virginia Beach area. This was reported at the time, but the story was fleeting. Two other events occurred in the area that are relevant to the story. In February 2023, a pair of F-22s from Langley shot down the Chinese spy balloon as it exited the United States over South Carolina into the Atlantic Ocean. In January 2024, a Chinese graduate student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested for flying a drone...

Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached. "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site. The...

Using a security loophole that allows the US government access to anybody's electronic traffic, Chinese hackers gained access to an unknown quantity (perhaps all) of internet traffic on American networks. In an exclusive report in Saturday's Wall Street Journal the secret breach was revealed.Good thread too: Manufacturers of networking and phone gear must follow specific standards for 'lawful interception' in different jurisdictions (e.g. CALEA & ETSI's standards) But as we learn time & time again, the scope of potential access & harm almost never matched by efforts to detect & block malicious use. https://t.co/jKREtYTBuh— Matt Johansen (@mattjay) October 5, 2024The...

The Department of Justice announced 17 new charges against Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange on Thursday, including a virtually unprecedented move to charge him with publishing classified material — a move that could pose challenges to First Amendment protections. In a superseding indictment, a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, has accused Assange of breaking the law by inducing Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning to send him classified documents — and then publishing material that included the names of confidential sources who provided information to American diplomats. The 17 counts were tacked on to a single count accusing Assange of conspiring with Manning...

A federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.   The new indictment does not add additional counts to the prior 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019.  It does, however, broaden the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.  According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions...

Hackers reportedly had access to former President Donald Trump’s campaign systems through mid-September, and evidence suggests the breach may still be ongoing.... ... journalist Judd Legum detailed in his Popular Information newsletter on Tuesday that he received a further set of documents from an anonymous source named “Robert,” which he said included internal campaign files. While some of these documents held potential news value, one newly surfaced document, dated September 15, indicates the hack is both more recent and extensive than initially thought. The new document is a letter from the campaign and addressed to the New York Times...A source...

When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists. So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software. But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had...

Nearly every American's Social Security number may have been leaked, with a hacking group claiming they stole nearly 3 billion records of personal information. A massive database containing over 2.7 billion records has reportedly ended up on a criminal forum. These records belong to individuals in the U.S. and were allegedly stolen from National Public Data (NPD). While the accuracy of the leaked data could not be verified, the hackers reportedly obtained sensitive information such as names, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers. The scale of this breach is so vast that if you live in the U.S., it's likely...

With headlines like “Harris Surges Ahead: A New Era of Democratic Enthusiasm and Opportunity” and “Former Friend Exposes JD Vance’s Radical Transformation: A Study in Political Opportunism”, you might mistake NioThinker for another mainstream media outlet. Only the occasional odd word choice and convoluted bit of grammar hints that the digital media site flowing with enthusiasm for Kamala and contempt for Trump isn’t really American. Classified as part of Iran’s ‘Storm-2035’ network: NioThinker is an enemy operation. Why is an Islamic terrorist state spending its time putting up articles like “Trump Silent After Fox News Poll Favors Harris in Swing...

Cyber experts have urgently warned people to update their passwords after a hacker uploaded billions of login details. The leak, called RockYou2024, was posted on July 4th containing a staggering 10 billion passwords from a compilation of old and new data breaches. Researchers who revealed the leak said the information could allow hackers to target any system that isn’t protected by strict security software including online and offline services, online cameras and industrial hardware. This could prompt a wave of data breaches, financial fraud and identity theft using the passwords, which were collected from more than 4,000 databases over the...

Last week a cyberattack hit a huge number of car dealers in the United States. The software designed by the company CDK was completely disabled, affecting the whole of an integrated process of purchasing and processing. Sellers could not process sales, loans, insurance, registrations, and much more. It happened suddenly, lasted two and a half days, came back, then went down again.How did car dealers function? They wrote it all out on paper and pledged to complete the process after the systems came back. They are back and all seems well but the experience is a warning sign. These systems...

The Lockbit ransomware group announced that it had breached the systems of Federal Reserve of the United States and exfiltrated 33 TB of sensitive data, including “Americans’ banking secrets.” The Lockbit ransomware group added the Federal Reserve to the list of victims on its Tor data leak site and threatened to leak the stolen data on 25 June, 2024 20:27:10 UTC. The group hasn’t published any sample of the stolen data. “Federal banking is the term for the way the Federal Reserve of the United States distributes its money. The Reserve operates twelve banking districts around the country which oversee...

I was just notified by CreditKarma that The Post Millennial [thepostmillennial.com] had a data breach that shared my personal information: The Post Millennial breach Reported on May 2024 In May 2024, The Post Millennial's database was allegedly breached. Even if you don't use your The Post Millennial account anymore, it's important to protect any info that was exposed.

It has been 143 days since the Curling v. Raffensperger case rested and Judge Totenberg estimated “about 30 days” to make her ruling. Is she going to wait until it is too late to do anything with the voting machines? My guess is YES, she will delay her ruling until it is too late to do anything. Judge Totenberg is looking like she has been influenced or corrupted by pressure from the state. I bet she retires before making her ruling.

Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and Europe. An investigation into Stark Industries reveals it is being used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia. At least a dozen patriotic Russian hacking groups have been launching DDoS attacks since the start of the war at a variety of targets seen as opposed to Moscow. But...

Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s daughter, Navy, claimed Friday her phones “crashed” and “just about everything” with Hunter Biden on the device was “gone” after she discovered she was pregnant. Roberts claimed to Sirius XM’s Megyn Kelly that both of her cellphone screens “crashed” at the same time in front of both she and her friends the night she learned she was pregnant with Navy. Yes. It looks like a total meltdown,” Kelly said. Roberts said “a lot of stuff” involving Hunter Biden was missing from her iCloud when she got a new phone the next day. “Just...

Chinese hackers are preparing to launch a major attack on critical U.S. infrastructure and have already infiltrated multiple companies according to the FBI. FBI Director Chris Wray revealed today China is developing the capability to cause significant damage to our critical infrastructure at a time of their choosing. The only question is the time to launch a catastrophic blow. “China is developing the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian...