Free Republic

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...

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...

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...

We already knew that a weaponized Deep State Blob was jumping over the Constitutional guardrails to monitor Americans. Whether it was the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or Big Finance giddily handing over MAGA customer information without a court order, the Deep State has waded through Americans’ smartphones and social media at will to categorize, target, and silence Americans. This behavior is shameful, and after January 20, 2025, hopefully, investigations will be announced for at least the worst of the worst of the Deep State Offenders. Because of this unlawful behavior, the $106 billion per year spent on the National...

A major cyberattack on big US telecom companies has led officials to recommend that people use encrypted messaging apps. Microsoft named the attack "Salt Typhoon," and it's affecting companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies. Officials haven't released a timeline for when everything will be fixed, but they did say that a lot of different types of information were accessed in the breach. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advised using encrypted messaging apps like Signal or iMessage to reduce the chances of messages being intercepted. This essentially means to stop using SMS because it's not...

China has emerged as the most prolific intelligence threat to U.S. having engaged in corporate espionage, intellectual-property theft, and personnel information breaches going back decades. A naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated from China has been sentenced to four years in prison after conspiring to act as a agent of the Chinese government, highlighting the broad reach of Beijing’s security service and strategy of co-opting immigrants for intelligence gathering, according to the Justice Department. The plea agreement and court filings announced Monday show China’s Ministry of State Security – the Communist-run country's intelligence service – used operative Peng Li as a...

Multiple U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, have been breached by a Chinese hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon, the Wall Street Journal reports. The purpose of the attack appears to be intelligence collection as the hackers might have had access to systems used by the U.S. federal government for court-authorized network wiretapping requests. It is unclear when the intrusion occurred, but WSJ cites people familiar with the matter, saying that "for months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data." Salt Typhoon is...