Free Republic

Iran-backed Hezbollah laundered money through Awan family used-car lot. When IT man Imran Awan attempted to flee the country in July, the feds busted him on bank fraud charges. Imran’s brother Abid ran a used-car lot in Falls Church, Virginia, called Cars International A. Trouble was, the “CIA” dealership had no inventory and the sales people were fakes. As Rosiak learned, the Awan dealership “took money from a Hezbollah-linked fugitive” whose financial books were “indecipherable.” And as the DEA was aware, “the Iranian-linked terrorist group frequently deployed used car dealerships in the US to launder money and fund terrorism.” On...

he Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency outsourced its "censorship operation" to a nonprofit it funded following a First Amendment lawsuit by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, "implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional," according to an interim staff report by House Judiciary Committee Republicans shared with Just the News. CISA also wanted to use the Center for Internet Security, which operates the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) and Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), as its "mouthpiece" to obfuscate its own role in censorship, the report says. It cites spring 2022...

A global conflict between the great powers of the world is already "in full swing,” according to a senior Russian diplomat, and it's happening in cyberspace. "The war [in cyberspace] is underway and unfolding very intensively,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s international information security director, Alexander Krutskikh, told a political science conference on Thursday. “The media rightly says that this [is] a Third World War, and what matters now is to calculate the damage and determine who will lose it in the end and what shape the world will eventually acquire as a result of this war.”... ...“No matter how hard...

Massive data breaches have become so common that we’ve gotten numb to reports detailing another hack or 0-day exploit. That doesn’t reduce the risk of such events happening, as the cat-and-mouse game between security experts and hackers continues. As some vulnerabilities get fixed, others pop up requiring attention from product and service providers. The newest one has a name that will not mean anything to most people. They call the hack Log4Shell in security briefings, which doesn’t sound very scary. But the new 0-day attack is so significant that some people see it as the worst internet hack in history.......

REvil, the ransomware group that hacked the U.S. Colonial Pipeline this past May, was itself hacked and shut down by a multinational cyber operation, according to Reuters. The Russia-based organization was reportedly hacked using the same technique that they had used to bring down the pipeline. Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worked alongside investigative arms from multiple other countries,,,

I've been in the technology industry for over twenty years and I've seen fads come and go. When I got started in 2000 I oversaw the migration of data from old tape drives to modern 1GB hard drives. Then at my job I oversaw the end of the mainframe and the ascendancy of the PC and server as the new form of decentralized network infrastructure. From 2001 through to around 2010 the internet and internet access were present in the government agency I work for but most people were prohibited from using it. And if they did their access was...

The US Senate has voted to give law enforcement agencies access to web browsing data without a warrant, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. A bipartisan amendment that would have prohibited law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, from obtaining the web browsing and internet search histories of Americans without a warrant failed to pass in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday by a single vote. We are talking about the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act of 2020 that would have required authorities to obtain a warrant before gaining access to American internet browsing and...

Ask Internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman how he decides which companies to invest in, and he’ll tell you he has a simple litmus test to determine whether to give the idea a closer look. “I want to invest in companies that play to one or more of the seven deadly sins,” Hoffman said. For those a bit rusty, those sins would be: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Hoffman, best known as co-founder of LinkedIn, says the business-professional networking-platform most embodies the deadly sin of greed. “In the end, LinkedIn is helping someone earn...

I have just reprogrammed a laptop for a friend. When I did, of course Windows 10 was reinstalled on it, and of course Windows Defender was also reinstalled as well. With all the news coming out lately about Windows Defender interfering with Windows Updates, and of course most of us know just how reliable (I'm trying really hard not to throw up on my keyboard right now) Windows Defender is, I'm trying to find a newer, better, SIMPLER Internet Security program. I've used AVG myself for many years but it's getting to the point where I hate to use it...

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you." I don't know, or care, who said that originally, but in this age of hacking and cyber corruption – and the deep state trying desperately to defeat the forces of light - it's becoming increasingly clear that there appears to be folks out in cyberspace who don't have your best interests in mind. Indeed, you may have heard about how Facebook and Google have been revealed as corrupt data miners more interested in raking in cash and helping their fellow political travellers than in providing the benign...

I recently installed a Netgear Nighthawk X6 router. I've replaced the default passwords with 10 digit, random, unrelated characters. Two of my devices (a desktop and a laptop) are running Avast free virus protection. When I run an Avast scan, it says Service is vulnerable to attacks from within your network. When I click on their recommended solution, they say to update the firmware. I've gone to the Netgear website and it says all is updated. I recently vacationed in Colorado. I stayed at a private condo and used their wifi. I ran the Avast scan on my laptop. At...

Google and Microsoft are butting heads over the disclosure of vulnerabilities. On Monday, Google revealed a critical flaw in Windows after it gave Microsoft a ten-day window to warn the public about it.Google posted about the zero-day vulnerability on its security blog, saying Microsoft had yet to publish a fix or issue an advisory about the software flaw."This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited," Google said. It lets hackers exploit a bug in the Windows kernel, via a win32k.sys system call, to bypass the security sandbox.The search giant originally told Microsoft about the problem...

Sites across the internet had problems on Friday morning following a cyberattack on a major internet management company. On Friday morning, Dyn — a company that hosts domain name systems — announced it has been the subject of a cyberattack that caused major problems for numerous websites. People reported issues with Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vox Media sites, Airbnb and numerous other sites. SEE ALSO: It's war: U.S. officially blames Russia for recent hacks Domain name systems (DNS) are essentially the GPS of the internet, taking the text URLs you type into a browser and figuring out where those websites’ data...

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks, according to documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The spy agencies have reverse engineered software products, sometimes under questionable legal authority, and monitored web and email traffic in order to discreetly thwart anti-virus software and obtain intelligence from companies about security software and users of such software. One security software maker repeatedly singled out in the documents is Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, which has a holding registered in the U.K., claims more than...

This is an advance notification for one out-of-band security bulletin that Microsoft is intending to release on May 1, 2014. The bulletin addresses the security vulnerability in Internet Explorer described in Microsoft Security Advisory 2963983.

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

The Global Positioning System helps power everything from in-car satnavs and smart bombs to bank security and flight control, but its founder has warned that it is more vulnerable to sabotage or disruption than ever before – and politicians and security chiefs are ignoring the risk. Impairment of the system by hostile foreign governments, cyber criminals – or even regular citizens – has become “a matter of national security”, according to Colonel Bradford Parkinson, who is hailed as the architect of modern navigation. “If we don’t watch out and we aren’t prepared,” then countries could be denied everything from ‘navigation’...

Did you know that Android - version 2.2 and later - comes with a feature that lets you track and manage your mobile device? Look for Google Settings among all the apps on your handset. It is denoted by a grey icon with a lower case 'g' and a gear symbol. Tap on the app, and choose the last option which reads 'Android Device Manager' . From here, you can activate features that will locate your device in case it is lost or misplaced, and you can also remotely lock and factory reset your handset. After you've checked these options...

If there's one guarantee on the Internet, it's that there will be no shortage of security concerns on Facebook. Facebook invades your privacy, uses you in ads, misuses your Likes and could cost you your job. That's only counting threats from Facebook itself! Since it has more than a billion members, it only makes sense that hackers and scammers would target Facebook. People spend hours on the site and reveal all sorts of private information. That only makes a criminal's job easier.

When you surf the Internet, everyone is watching... Well, it's not as hard as you may think to browse anonymously and preserve your privacy. All you need are a few tools and some coaching in covert ops. That's where I come in. Just call me Komando...Kim Komando...