Cybersecurity

The website of an obscure government organization called the Federal Depository Library Program was hijacked over the weekend by hackers claiming to be linked to Iran.

A massive data leak from Facebook has exposed the names, personal IDs, and phone numbers of 267 million users — most of them American — on the dark web, according to reports.

Credit card giant Visa is warning its cardholders that cyber criminals are targeting gas pumps in order to steal personal credit card data.

Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) released a plan Monday that describes how she would secure elections against cyber and disinformation threats should she be elected president.

The United Nations is investigating at least 35 cyberattacks thought to have been perpetrated by North Korean hackers against targets in 17 countries, with the goal of stealing or extorting enough money to finance the rogue Communist nation’s nuclear missile program.

News broke over the weekend that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the agency that took over domestic security after the dissolution of the KGB, was targeted by hackers over the past two months. The size of the data files posted online by the hackers suggests it was the worst data breach ever suffered by a Russian intelligence agency.

A report published by the Washington Post on Monday charged China’s telecom giant Huawei with secretly helping North Korea create and maintain its wireless network, possibly in violation of U.S. bans on the delivery of sensitive electronic equipment to the isolated Communist regime in Pyongyang. Another report from Czech Republic media accused the company of secretly harvesting personal information about its Czech customers.

If 5G wireless is so clearly a concern for U.S. intelligence, a portion of the intelligence budget could be invested in creating an American competitor to China’s dominant Huawei corporation.

China is the United States’ main national security challenge for the next 50 to 100 years, the Army general picked to become the top military officer in the United States said during a Senate hearing on Thursday.

A study published this week by researchers from Fulbright University Vietnam and the London-based Henry Jackson Society revealed much deeper ties between employees of the Huawei telecom company and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) than the corporation has previously admitted.

The UK Guardian reported on Tuesday that border police in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, home of the oppressed Uighur Muslims, are installing secret surveillance apps on the smartphones of travelers who enter the region and raiding those phones for personal information.

Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that employees of Chinese telecom giant Huawei have “collaborated on research projects with Chinese armed forces personnel, indicating closer ties to the country’s military than previously acknowledged.”

China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday criticized the United States for reportedly launching a cyberattack on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and turned American criticism of Chinese technology on its head by claiming Washington is the party waging a long campaign of electronic espionage against Beijing.

The city of Riviera Beach, Florida, agreed this week to pay $600,000 ransom in Bitcoin to a gang of hackers that encrypted its data, having concluded efforts to fight the data theft would be even more expensive and possibly futile.

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is set to act as the keynote speaker at the upcoming Cyber Defense Summit 2019. Cybersecurity powerhouse FireEye claims that Clinton, despite claiming incompetence with technology, will hold an “intimate Q&A keynote discussion.”

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping on Sunday saluted the 2019 China International Big Data Industry Expo with a congratulatory letter calling for more international cooperation on data security.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday accused Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei of lying about his company’s ties to the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party, which controls it.

In Washington, DC, on May 9, Jeff Bezos introduced his vision for humanity’s future trek to space.

Chinese officials and state-run media condemned President Donald Trump’s executive order effectively blocking Chinese telecom giant Huawei from U.S. markets, deriding it as an example of Trump’s “Cold War mentality” and vowing to protect Chinese business interests by any means necessary.

President Donald Trump reportedly will sign an executive order this week banning U.S. telecom companies from using equipment that has been deemed risky to national security. The order will not specify individual companies or countries of origin, but it will clearly have the most profound impact on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

AMC Networks exposed 1.62 million total records — including data of subscribers’ names, emails, and subscription details  — on the open internet connected to its Sundance Now and Shudder subscription streaming services.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai recommended on Wednesday that China Mobile should not be allowed to operate in the United States because the Chinese telecom giant poses “substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks.”

Security officials in the United Kingdom issued a report on Thursday identifying further security risks in equipment from Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The report noted Huawei has made no progress on addressing previously identified problems and said it would be “difficult” to manage the security risk from further Huawei purchases.

A security report from Microsoft detailed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday described a cyber-espionage campaign of previously unsuspected scope conducted by Iranian hackers over the past two years. The hackers attacked over 200 companies around the world, inflicting hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

A Dutch cybersecurity analyst claimed on Monday to have discovered a database created by Chinese police that contains private information about 364 million social media users, revealing a government surveillance network of breathtaking scale and uncertain purpose.

DHS Secretary has enjoyed glowing remarks by her friends in the Washington, D.C. beltway as she has overseen skyrocketing illegal immigration.

Facebook has opened its users up to security risk, and potential theft, by allowing anyone on the platform to search for others using their phone numbers, which were only given to the social network for two-factor authentication security.

The Czech Republic’s National Office for Cybernetics and Information Security (NÚKIB) has upheld a decision in which it labelled tech giant Huawei  and ZTE a security risk in relation to both their hardware and software.

Cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt on Thursday announced the discovery of a gigantic trove of pilfered usernames and addresses for email accounts from a variety of services, quite possibly representing the largest breach of account information in history.

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei spoke to foreign reporters this week for the first time since his company concluded a disastrous year of cyber-espionage suspicions, bans by the United States and other governments, and Canada’s arrest of Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou, who happens to be Ren’s daughter. Ren did some damage control for Huawei in his press engagements, striving to project optimism and stressing his corporate independence from the Chinese Communist government.