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Racine resident Kya Christian Nelson, 23, admitted to one count of conspiracy and two counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release. From Nov. 7 to 13, 2020, Nelson went on a “swatting” spree where he’d falsely report dangerous situations at residences across the country, then livestream the ensuing police raids on social media, “sometimes while taunting responding police officers in communities such as West Covina and Oxnard,” the DOJ said. Those officers had often just cleared a home’s residents at gunpoint, as the reports they received...

The Department of Homeland Security has dismissed the members of its advisory committees—including the Cyber Safety Review Board, which investigates major cybersecurity incidents—as part of a Trump-administration drive to cut costs at the agency, according to three people familiar with the matter. An internal Jan. 20 memo from DHS Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman said, “In alignment with the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security, I am directing the termination of all current memberships on advisory committees within DHS, effective immediately...Future committee activities will be focused...

Nearly 100 domains hosting Sneaky 2FA phishing pages have been identified as of this month, suggesting moderate adoption by threat actors. "This kit is being sold as phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) by the cybercrime service 'Sneaky Log,' which operates through a fully-featured bot on Telegram," the company said in an analysis. "Customers reportedly receive access to a licensed obfuscated version of the source code and deploy it independently." Phishing campaigns have been observed sending payment receipt-related emails to entice recipients into opening bogus PDF documents containing QR code that, upon scanning, redirects them to Sneaky 2FA page Sekoia said the phishing pages...

Nearly four weeks since the start of the PowerSchool data breach began families, teachers and school districts remain in the dark about the scope of the breach compromising personal information uploaded on the platform.PowerSchool, a cloud-based platform that tens of thousands of schools use all over the country, has been the official student information system (SIS) since 2009 in South Carolina and 2013 in North Carolina.

During an interview with MSNBC aired on Monday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken responded to a question on whether there should be more consequences for China over its cyberhacking by stating that we’re trying “to stay ahead of it, both in terms of our defenses, both in terms of taking action, as necessary, against China, making sure that others are doing the same thing, other countries, working from the same page.” Blinken stated, “[W]hat we’ve done over these past years is to shore up our defenses everywhere, including right here at this department, to do everything possible...

A US Army soldier has been arrested in Texas after being indicted on two counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records information. While the indictment doesn't specify any hacking activity or victims' names, Cameron John Wagenius, 20, is suspected of being a cybercriminal known as Kiberphant0m, who claimed to have breached at least 15 telecommunications firms including AT&T and Verizon, according to KrebsOnSecurity. Wagenius is allegedly an associate of Connor Riley Moucka, one of the men accused of compromising multiple organizations' Snowflake-hosted environments, stealing sensitive customer data housed in the cloud storage service, and then extorting victims for millions...

A major Russian telecommunications company appears to have begun providing an Internet connection to North Korea. The new link supplements one from China and will provide back-up to Pyongyang at a time the US government is reportedly attacking its Internet infrastructure and pressuring China to end all business with North Korea. The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening. Internet routing databases map the thousands of connections between telecom providers and enable computers to figure out the best route to a destination. Until now, Internet...

A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a...

1. Modern Encryption Methods Will Be Rendered UselessFinancial technologies are completely dependent on modern encryption methods. Any password or key can be cracked by brute-force attack, but currently, computing power does not allow attackers to succeed in a reasonable time. With the release of quantum computing into the public sector, all encryption becomes useless, and currently, the industry has no answer on how to deal with it. - Pavlo Sidelov, SDK.finance2. Web Interactions Will Be At RiskThe breakdown of prevalent cryptographic technology is an infrastructural risk. Most security technology is based on our current inability to quickly find the prime...

CISA has urged ‘highly targeted’ individuals in the US Government or in senior political positions to immediately review and implement strict security measures with their mobile devices. This comes after multiple major US telecoms firms were hit by security breaches earlier in 2024, most likely originating from state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Recent reports also confirmed that the group behind the attack, Salt Typhoon, had not yet been fully eradicated, and still lurks inside US telecoms networks. As part of its advisory, CISA also released a best practice guide for mobile communications, which includes instructions on using end-to-end encryption, password managers, Fast...

Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee announced late on Friday that the state’s data system has been hit with a major cyberattack. McKee will hold an unprecedented press conference Friday at 7:30 PM regarding a cybersecurity breach of the RIBridges system. That system is managed by Deloitte, one of Rhode Island’s largest tech vendors, and the exposed data includes HealthSource, Medicaid, and SNAP. According to McKee’s office, on December 13, [today] the State was informed by its vendor, Deloitte, that there was a major security threat to the RIBridges system. In response, we have proactively taken the system offline so that...

NEW YORK, July 13 (Reuters) - A former CIA software engineer was convicted on Wednesday of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks from the spy agency, in one of the biggest such thefts in CIA history.

NEW YORK (AP) - A former CIA software engineer charged with leaking government secrets to WikiLeaks says it’s cruel and unusual punishment that he’s awaiting trial in solitary confinement, housed in a vermin-infested cell of a jail unit where inmates are treated like “caged animals.” Joshua Schulte, 32, has asked a Manhattan federal judge to force the federal Bureau of Prisons to improve conditions at the Metropolitan Correction Center, where he has been held for over two years under highly restrictive conditions usually reserved for terrorism defendants. In court papers Tuesday, Schulte maintained he is held in conditions “below that...

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the FBI, was recently targeted by an Iranian hacking campaign. According to the Washington Examiner, multiple sources claim that the FBI had informed both Patel and President-elect Trump of the cyberattack. The Trump transition team issued a statement that did not confirm such a hacking attempt, but nevertheless condemned Iran and praised Patel’s past work on counter-terrorism. “Kash Patel was a key part of the first Trump administration’s efforts against the terrorist Iranian regime and will implement President Trump’s policies to protect America from adversaries as the FBI...

It's being called the largest ever breach of protected patient health information by a government-regulated medical company in America's history. Change Healthcare, owned by UnitedHealth Group, fell victim to a cyberattack eight months ago, but revealed on Thursday that 100 million people had been impacted. That surpassed the previous recordholder for worst breach of US patient data: a 2015 episode at Anthem Inc. that compromised 78.8 million individuals. The first official report by Change Healthcare, which manages revenue and payments for medical providers, estimated in July that only 500 people had been compromised. Now, the scope of the February 21...

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...