Free Republic

Fortune 500 companies have unwittingly hired thousands of software engineers who claim to be American developers but are actually North Korean citizens using stolen or fake identities. Through legitimate employment, the IT workers are illegally funneling their salaries to Kim Jong Un’s regime to fund prohibited weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. The U.S. Treasury, State Department, and FBI collectively estimate the IT workers scam has generated hundreds of millions each year since 2018. About 95% of the résumés Harrison Leggio gets in response to job postings for his crypto startup g8keep are from North Korean engineers pretending...

Among Richard Nixon’s many presidential priorities—ending the Vietnam War, thawing relations with China, expanding environmental protections—there was one initiative his team hoped to keep well under the radar: his secret “enemies list.” In an August 1971 memo, White House Counsel John Dean offered a piquant summary of the project’s goal: to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The formal list began in June 1971as a short memo of 20 names of people, most of whom had deep ties to the Democratic Party. Actor Paul Newman made an appearance, with the notation “Radic-Lib causes. Heavy Mc Carthy...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day...

The Kremlin declined to comment Tuesday after the release of a report documenting the deaths of more than 95,000 Russian soldiers fighting Ukraine. The report was based on open-access data collated by independent Russian news outlet Mediazona in collaboration with the BBC's Russian Service. On the third anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion on Monday, Mediazona published an infographic with images and official reports of deaths of soldiers collated from various sources including social media, news reports and obituaries. Mediazona and the BBC have been updating the list since the offensive began. Each entry includes accessible information on the soldier...

proposal that would ban most junk food from being SNAP-eligible is under consideration in Washington, D.C. and in Frankfort. “The overall goal is to say that we recognize that these choices are not and do not provide good health outcomes,” said Rep. Matt Lockett (R-Nicholasville). House Bill 279 seeks to exclude energy drinks, prepared desserts, such as cookies and candy, potato and corn chips and soft drinks from being purchased using SNAP benefits. Rep. Lockett says it is a bill that is part of a larger goal to improve the health of Kentuckians both on and off the program. “In...

Christina Marie Chapman, a 48-year-old woman from Litchfield Park, Arizona, has pleaded guilty in federal court for her role in a scheme that funneled millions of dollars to North Korea. Over the course of three years, Chapman and her co-conspirators helped overseas IT workers pretend to be U.S. citizens so they could illegally secure remote IT jobs in the United States. The scheme involved more than 300 American companies, including some of the nation’s largest corporations. The fraudulent operation, which ran from October 2020 to October 2023, generated over $17 million in revenue. According to prosecutors, Chapman and her team...

Chris Murphy: "We don't pledge allegiance to the creepy 22 year olds working for Elon Musk. We pledge allegiance to the United States of America."

Several inspectors general are out of a job after President Donald Trump informed them they were fired on Friday evening. Approximately 17 of them were fired without notice via email, USA Today reported on Saturday, noting an official who lost their job confirmed the information to the newspaper. The outlet continued: The inspectors general are independent watchdogs within agencies who investigate and disclose waste, fraud and abuse. Those fired Friday include inspectors at the Pentagon and departments of State, Veterans Affairs and Interior, which oversees marine oil and gas leases as well as Indian Affairs, said the fired official who...

Massachusetts' first openly non-binary elected politician has taken a month off work with for the sake of their mental health after being accused of laziness and asked to return to in-person meetings. Thu Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, accused some of their fellow Worcester City Council members of deliberately misgendering them and referring to them as 'it'. They claimed to have been misgendered by Mayor Joe Petty and Councilor At-Large Kathleen Toomey. Nguyen also alleges they were referred to as 'it' on multiple occasions by Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson. 'These hateful acts are unbecoming of a legislative body whose duty is...

Feb 04, 2015 About 500 IT jobs are cut at utility through layoffs and voluntary departures Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs. The employees are upset and say they can’t understand how H-1B guest workers can be used to replace them. The IT organization’s “transition effort” is expected to result in about 400 layoffs, with “another 100 or so employees leaving voluntarily,” SCE said in a statement. The “transition,” which began in...

California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency due to H5N1, more commonly known as avian influenza or bird flu. The emergency follows an outbreak of the virus among dairy cows in Southern California farms, according to the news release on the governor’s website. After initially being reported in Texas and Kansas in March, bird flu has been confirmed in cattle across 16 U.S. states, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported. "This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this...

In a fiery letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), Chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, exposed the “systemic failure” within the Pentagon on January 6, 2021. Loudermilk accused the DoD of intentionally delaying the deployment of the D.C. National Guard (DCNG) and of publishing an Inspector General report that “whitewashes” the events to protect top Pentagon officials. The letter, addressed to Defense Department Inspector General Robert P. Storch, challenges the findings of Report No. 2022-039, which the DoD Inspector General’s office had presented as a comprehensive review of the Department’s role during...

Congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride appeared on The View after her historic win Tuesday night. McBride made history when Delaware elected her to the House of Representatives - making her the first transgender Congressperson ever. This isn't the first time that she's made history. As Joy Behar pointed out on The View, McBride was the first transgender intern at the White House in 2012, the first trans person to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and the first transgender state senator.

The bodies of Matthew Szejnrok, a North Brunswick native, and his 41-year-old girlfriend, Kelly McCollom, were found in McCollom's blood-covered home in Palm Bay, FL on July 7, just after midnight, according to charging documents obtained by Daily Voice. McCollom's 16-year-old daughter, Julia Egler, initially told police it was an intruder who had killed the pair, however, later confessed to the murders saying she'd reached "a boiling point" with her mother who was not very accepting of her transition, according to an affidavit of probable cause. Based on surveillance footage from the home’s exterior cameras, police determined McCollom and Szejnrok...

Multi-trillion-dollar tech company Microsoft has laid off an entire team dedicated explicitly to DEI in the wake of the recent global IT outage. The news comes just days after Microsoft estimated that 8.5m computers were disabled by the global IT outage caused by a “glitch” from security company CrowdStrike. The BBC reported: The fall out from the IT glitch has been enormous and was already one of the worst cyber-incidents in history. The number given by Microsoft means it is probably the largest ever cyber-event, eclipsing all previous hacks and outages. The closest to this is the WannaCry cyber-attack in...

CrowdStrike Intelligence has since observed threat actors leveraging the event to distribute a malicious ZIP archive named crowdstrike-hotfix.zip. The ZIP archive contains a HijackLoader payload...Notably, Spanish filenames and instructions within the ZIP archive indicate this campaign is likely targeting Latin America-based (LATAM) CrowdStrike customers.

A teenage boy may be responsible for a ransomware attack that shut down MGM Resorts in Las Vegas last year. The West Midlands Police Department in England confirmed that they arrested an unidentified 17-year-old on Thursday from the town of Walsall ...The attack happened on Sep. 12, 2023 allegedly with a simple 10 minute phone call to a Help desk employee using information obtained from LinkedIn....

American Airlines, United and Delta have asked the FAA for global ground stop on all flights, according to an alert from the FAA on Friday morning. The FAA is telling air traffic controllers to tell airborne pilots that airlines are currently experiencing communication issues. Meanwhile, flights in the air will stay in the air, but no American, United or Delta flights will take off....

The Denver Police Department released video yesterday showing an officer shoot and kill a transgender attacker while the offender allegedly charged with a knife. Denver 7 reported the incident occurred June 16 “in the intersection of Broadway and Lawrence Street.” The deceased was identified as “52-year-old Miguel Tapia.” Tapia was initially identified as a woman but Tuesday, during a press conference, police described Tapia as transgender.

A transgender woman [man] allegedly gunned down her [his] parents inside their Utah home Tuesday night, according to police and reports. Mia Bailey — whom police said wears wigs and changes her [his]appearance frequently — was cornered and arrested Wednesday after an extensive manhunt that spanned several hours. Cops warned she [he]was to be considered “armed and dangerous” while she was still on the loose. “We have some good news,” Officer Tiffany Mitchell with the St. George Police Department announced on Facebook. “We have the suspect in custody. Everyone is safe. No one else was injured.” Bailey, 28, was immediately...