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s Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish. Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the...

A report by German tech site heise.de says Intel's CPUs are affected by eight new "Spectre-class" vulnerabilities, including one found by Google's Project Zero, which identified the first set of CPU flaws known as Meltdown and Spectre. The site reports that the bugs have been assigned CVE identifiers and that at least one of them will be revealed by Project Zero on May 7, a day ahead of Patch Tuesday, which Microsoft recently begun using to distribute Intel's hardware patches or microcode updates.The site says it has concrete evidence that Intel processors are vulnerable to the new flaws and that...

There are some initially revealing aspects to the release including: revelations that DNI James Clapper was a leaker to CNN about the Steele Dossier content and Presidential Briefing [SEE HERE]; and that Former Dianne Feinstein staff raised $50 million after the election to continue funding Fusion-GPS and Christopher Steele …………Also: ……………….. the revelations of Senator Dianne Feinstein participating in the overall post-election scheme to deploy the insurance policy [SEE HERE] do answer a nagging question that always seemed to lay quietly below the surface. During 2016 Senator Feinstein was part of the Gang of Eight by way of her position...

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said Sunday his review of FBI and Justice Department “electronic communication” documents shows no intelligence was used to begin the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Continue Reading Below “We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation. We know that Sidney Blumenthal and others were pushing information into the State Department. So we’re trying to piece all that together and that’s why we continue to look at the State Department,” Nunes told Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”Nunes,...

Researchers have discovered a new side-channel attack method that can be launched against devices with Intel processors, and the patches released in response to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities might not prevent these types of attacks.The new attack, dubbed BranchScope, has been identified and demonstrated by a team of researchers from the College of William & Mary, University of California Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and Binghamton University.Similar to Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope can be exploited by an attacker to obtain potentially sensitive information they normally would not be able to access directly. The attacker needs to have access...

Intel has started releasing new microcode updates that should address one of the Spectre vulnerabilities after the first round of patches caused significant problems for many users. The company has so far released new firmware updates only for its Skylake processors, but expects updates to become available for other platforms as well in the coming days. Customers and partners have been provided beta updates to ensure that they can be extensively tested before being moved into production. The chipmaker started releasing microcode patches for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities shortly after the attack methods were disclosed by researchers. However, the...

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes issued the following statement today: “Having stonewalled Congress’ demands for information for nearly a year, it’s no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies. The FBI is intimately familiar with ‘material omissions’ with respect to their presentations to both Congress and the courts, and they are welcome to make public, to the greatest extent possible, all the information they have on these abuses. Regardless, it’s clear that top officials used unverified information in...

Intel told Chinese firms about chip flaw before US gov: report Intel Corporation initially warned a handful of customers, including several Chinese technology firms, about security flaws within its processor chips, while at the same time not telling the U.S. government, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Security experts told the newspaper that the decision could have allowed Chinese tech companies to flag the vulnerabilities to Beijing, giving the Chinese government opportunity to exploit them. Jake Williams, head of the security company Rendition Infosec and former National Security Agency (NSA) employee, told the Journal that it is a “near certainty”...

Out-of-band patch may assuage user anger over Intel crudware, closed-club disclosure process Microsoft has implemented Intel's advice to reverse the Spectre variant 2 microcode patches.Redmond issued a rare weekend out-of-cycle advisory on Saturday here, to make the unwind possible.Intel's first patch was so bad, it made many computers less stable, sending Linus Torvalds into a justifiable meltdown last week.Chipzilla later withdrew the patch, but it had made its way into a Microsoft fix, which the company pulled on Saturday.“Our own experience is that system instability can in some circumstances cause data loss or corruption,” Microsoft wrote, adding “We understand that...

Intel finished 2017 on a high note with revenue that handily topped expectations - especially in its key data center group, according to quarterly financial results issued Thursday afternoon. The company said it expects a $1.3 billion windfall in 2018 from the federal tax overhaul approved last month and said it will give nearly half of it to shareholders through a 10 percent increase in the company's dividend. The news sent Intel's shares up 3.75 percent in after-hours trading, to $47 a share. Intel's stock remains near its highest-point since the dot-com era.

Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense. That makes all your [i.e. Woodhouse’s] arguments questionable and suspicious. The patches do things that are not sane. …So somebody isn’t telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. ...Intel, for its part, offered the following statement: “We take the feedback of industry partners seriously. We are actively engaging with the Linux community, including Linus,...

Huma Abedin, top aide to then-Secy of State Hillary Clinton, routed sensitive information,including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows. Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was affected by one or more of a series of breaches—at least one of which was perpetrated by...

To understand the Four Page House Intelligence Memo at the heart of today’s FISA Abuse stories, it helps to understand why the memo is needed.  We wrote about the issue in a March 2017 outline called: “The Nunes Paradox”  – SEE HEREAs the year-long story has unfolded, there are two central components at the heart of the political corruption and weaponization of the DOJ and FBI:♦First, corruption within the DOJ and FBI that included their use of unlawful use of FISA-702 exploits; and ♦Second, how that intelligence information was extracted, passed along to those outside government, repackaged, and reconstituted into...

Video at link is 8:26 minutes in length. Dustin Nemos is an excellent source of calmed informed updates on Trump's war against the swamp and Q Anon.

As a performance junkie, I’m less concerned about the security risks of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities—after all, there are no known exploits in use today—than I am about a performance hit from the fixes.And from what I’m seeing, my concerns are warranted.My sole experience with a fully updated platform so far is with Microsoft’s original Surface Book. It’s based on an Intel “Skylake” Core i7-6700U and has 16GB of LPDDR3 and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive. The Surface Book is running the 64-bit Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator’s Update.[ Further reading: How to remove malware from your...

F-Secure has reported another serious flaw in Intel hardware, which could enable hackers to access corporate laptops. Standard password of Intels Management Engine BIOS Extension are rarely changed and can invoke business laptops vulnerable to unauthorized remote access, claims F-Secure. Intels Management Engine BIOS Extension, or MEBx, contains the standard log-in combination 'admin', 'admin' and because many users simply do not change it, according to F-Secure this opens the door to an easy to set-up attack. Attackers can open the BIOS Extension during startup with Ctrl + P, even if the user has set a bios password. Then they can manage settings of the Management Engine, reports dw.com."The issue...

Yesterday , my wife shut down our HP before I could stop Windows Updates for the time being until MS gets the patch issue resolved . Athlon 2 prosessor / Windows 7 / 64 bit . After rebooting a few times yesterday we got the computer to work again and I left it on all night so I could use this morning . Seemed to be working OK but after I went into Windows Update to check download history - where I discovered the newest patch had been installed " successfully " - and then closed that window and again...

Users have complained that the updates released by Microsoft last week for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities cause Windows to break down on some computers with AMD processors. Several individuals whose computers rely on AMD processors, particularly older Athlon models, say they are unable to start Windows 10 after installing KB4056892, an update released by Microsoft in response to the disclosure of serious flaws affecting Intel, AMD and ARM processors. The security holes have been dubbed Spectre and Meltdown and they allow malicious applications to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access passwords, photos, documents, emails, and other sensitive information. Both...

A series of flaws have been discovered in Intel, AMD, and ARM chipsets that allow speculative references to be probed for privileged data. "Meltdown" is a flaw currently believed to affect only Intel processors and "melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware". "Spectre" is a flaw that affects Intel, AMD, and ARM processors due to the way "speculative execution" is handled. Both could theoretically be used to read information from a computer's memory, including private information like passwords, photos, messages, and more. Apple has apparently already started patching Meltdown in macOS. Here's what you need to know....

What are Meltdown and Spectre? Do they only affect Intel chips? Will the fixes slow my computer … and what even is a processor? Meltdown and Spectre are the names of two serious security flaws that have been found within computer processors. They could allow hackers to steal sensitive data without users knowing, one of them affecting chips made as far back as 1995. What are Meltdown and Spectre? Meltdown is a security flaw that could allow hackers to bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer’s core memory, which is normally highly protected. Spectre is...