Free Republic

The Secret Service on Tuesday slammed "outlandish" suggestions that its agents are "incompetent to carry out forensic examinations" following the arrest of a Chinese national who is accused of trying to enter President Trump's Mar-a-Lago club with a thumb drive containing malware. “Assertions that U.S. Secret Service agents are incompetent to carry out forensic examinations on digital media (ie thumbdrives, laptops, cellphones, etc.) is outlandish and not rooted in fact," a Secret Service spokesperson said in a released statement. The spokesperson added that the agency's Electronic Crimes Special Agent Program (ECSAP) "is internationally recognized" said there are special agents who...

Only up for five hours, but that's plenty of time for the wrong person to spot itUpdated An Amazon Web Services engineer published exchanges with customers and "system credentials including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys" to a public GitHub repository by accident.On 13 January, infosec biz UpGuard discovered a 954MB repository containing AWS resource templates – used to create cloud services – plus hostnames, and log files generated in the second half of 2019. There were also internal Amazon training resources marked "confidential." "Several documents contained access keys for various cloud services," UpGuard reported today. "There were multiple...

Sales for some at-home DNA testing kits are on the decline amid consumer privacy concerns. 23andMe, the home DNA-testing company, is laying off about 100 people, nearly 14 percent of its staff, the company confirmed to FOX Business Friday. The company cut staffers in its operations department in charge of growing and scaling the company as fewer people pay for genetic test results which can reveal things about their heritage or how prone they are to health conditions like type 2 diabetes or celiac disease, according to a CNBC report. The declining sales came as a surprise for CEO Anne...

A new report reveals that 250 million Microsoft customer records, spanning 14 years, have been exposed online without password protection. Microsoft has been in the news for, mostly, the wrong reasons recently. There is the Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't issued a patch for, despite it being actively exploited. That came just days after the U.S. Government issued a critical Windows 10 update now alert concerning the "extraordinarily serious" curveball crypto vulnerability. Now a newly published report, has revealed that 250 million Microsoft customer records, spanning an incredible 14 years in all, have been exposed online in a...

Harry, 35, and 38-year-old Meghan are set to snap up the property for a knockdown price after new tax rules on top-end homes sparked a 16 per cent drop in value in the area over two years. Their near neighbours would include Canadian billionaire founder of the uber-trendy Lululemon Athletica yoga gear brand, Chip Wilson, whose mansion is worth £38 million. Yoga and pilates fan Meg is known to be a fan of the Lululemon brand. Kitsilano - full of rich and famous “movers and shakers” and particularly popular with trendy tech entrepreneurs - is seen as a perfect setting...

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference. The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website firewall, and anti-bot protections.

A missing Florida teen with autism made it through a TSA checkpoint at the Orlando International Airport with a stranger’s boarding pass - and told authorities that “she just wanted to fly in an airplane,” according to new reports. Sade Subbs, 15, who the Apopka Police Department says “suffers from high-functioning autism,” was last seen around 10 p.m. Thursday near Lake Jackson Circle in the Orange County city before she vanished, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The next day, a Southwest Airlines employee at the airport spotted the teen wandering around a gate and asked her if she needed help,...

The National Security Agency has discovered a major security flaw in Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system that could allow hackers to intercept seemingly secure communications. But rather than exploit the flaw for its own intelligence needs, the NSA tipped off Microsoft so that it can fix the system for everyone. Microsoft released a free software patch to fix the flaw Tuesday and credited the agency for discovering it. The company said it has not seen any evidence that hackers have used the technique discovered by the NSA. Amit Yoran, CEO of security firm Tenable, said it is "exceptionally rare if...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Thursday he’d spoken with top NYPD officials about immediate steps the department could take to protect key areas in the city from a potential retaliatory attack by Iranian after a U.S.-led airstrike that killed a top Iranian general. “We will have to be vigilant against this threat for a long time to come,” De Blasio tweeted. ______________________________________ Mayor Bill de Blasio ✔ @NYCMayor Have spoken with Commissioner Shea + Dep Commissioner Miller about immediate steps NYPD will take to protect key NYC locations from any attempt by Iran or its terrorist...

The Nonprofit Security Grants Program (NSPG) allows houses of worship and other nonprofits to apply for grants of up to $100 thousand for each institution. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer announced Monday he would push to quadruple the budget for the Nonprofit Security Grants Program (NSPG) from $90 million to $360m. a year. The program allows houses of worship and other nonprofits to apply for grants of up to $100,000 for each institution. The money can be used for security measures such as fencing, cameras, stronger doors and hiring of security personnel.

ToTok, an Emirati messaging app that has been downloaded to millions of phones, is the latest escalation of a digital arms race. IMAGE: The Aldar Building in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where the Emirates’ signals intelligence agency and Pax AI, a data mining firm linked to ToTok, have their offices.  Photo Credit...Ben Job/ReutersWASHINGTON — It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype.But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials...

In an extensive report that is part of its “Privacy Project,” The New York Times revealed Thursday that it has gained access to cell phone tracking data for millions of Americans and was able to rather easily track the movements of regular Americans as well as high-profile and powerful figures, including President Trump himself — details of whose actions the Times published in a follow-up report. In its initial report, titled “Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy,” the Times warns that if you were able to see the data which they obtained from a single private cell phone app...

IF YOU OWN A MOBILE PHONE, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump.

The records of hundreds of millions Facebook users was discovered in a online forum on the dark web. The unsecure database contained the IDs, phone numbers and full names of 267 million users, most of which reside in the US. Although it is not yet clear how the sensitive information was exposed, experts speculate the database was compiled through an illegal process called ‘scraping’ – automated bots copied public information from Facebook profiles. Access to the database has since been removed, however, the recorders were available online for two weeks before the leak was discovered.

The increased connectivity of computers and the growth of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in most organizations is making the distribution of malicious software (malware) easier. Unlike other types of malicious programs that may usually go undetected for a longer period, a ransomware attack is usually experienced immediately, and its impact on information technology infrastructure is often irreversible. As part of Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART) Incident Response engagements, we regularly get asked by customers about “paying the ransom” following a ransomware attack. Unfortunately, this situation often leaves most customers with limited options, depending on the business continuity and...

A quiet hero, most will never understand what Rogers did for our country. It’s difficult to fully convey or appreciate Admiral Rogers’ actions. He quietly stood against a deeply embedded Intelligence apparatus and risked his reputation and career. Although it may take some time, it is my hope that his role will be more fully appreciated. It’s entirely possible there would have been no FISA disclosure without the 2016 actions of Rogers. There might have been no investigation by Inspector General Horowitz.

The Mexican federal government announced the filing of a lawsuit in a U.S. court against Walmart for the August 3 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Mexico City claims the shopping center failed in providing necessary and reasonable security measures. A U.S. law firm hired by Mexico’s Consulate in El Paso filed the lawsuit on behalf of 10 Mexican nationals who were victims in the attack. On August 3, a lone gunman entered the Walmart near the Cielo Vista shopping center targeting what he called “Hispanic invaders” in a manifesto. The man killed 22 and injured 24 more. Texas prosecutors...

Inattentional blindness occurs when you fail to notice an object or even a person that’s right in front of you because your attention was focused on something else, such as a task or an event or some other object. In aviation security, for example, an airport police officer might fail to discern a fully visible traveler who’s accidentally crossed through an equally visible portal into a non-public area because the police officer is engaged in another task. Both activities – the traveler entering a non-public area and the task the officer is performing – are plainly evident to him, but...

TRUMP WALL - Track The Status Of Trump's Border Wall Project List Overview: 1 Map Name Date of Contract Announcement Start Date Completion Date Percent Completed State/City/Region Total Miles Total Built: Type of Wall Cost (millions) Per Mile Cost Funding Source (per CBP press release) Contractor URL 2 September 30, 2019 January 2020 Starr, Hidalgo and Cameron County, Texas 65 0.0 The border wall system will include an 18-30 foot tall steel bollard wall, all-weather roads, lighting, enforcement cameras, and other related technology to create a complete enforcement zone. $386 M $6 M FY19 appropriations Southern Border Constructors and Gibraltar-Caddell Joint...

Am I being promised money for little or no effort on my part? Many offers are meant to compromise your security. Don’t interact with people promoting an offer that’s too good to be true.