hackers - Page 13

Not only has the American human intelligence system been disastrously compromised around the world, but back here at home, the intel community is going to be playing defense for years to come, worried sick about how many government employees with security clearances might have been approached for recruitment or blackmail by China and its allies.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has revised its timeline on a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of 4 million Americans to foreign hackers.

The government knew security was wide open for years, and did nothing. It’s a wonder they weren’t hacked before now. There will be no “accountability” for any of this. The Obama Administration doesn’t like to concede any sort of error by collecting scalps from inept high-level employees, and it worries a great deal about what some of them might say in whistleblower interviews or tell-all books.

Websites run by the Canadian government were attacked on Wednesday, causing widespread service interruptions. The “Anonymous” hacker collective claimed responsibility for the attack, describing it as a protest against the recent passage of a controversial anti-terrorism bill, which the hackers denounced as “a clear violation of the universal declaration of human rights.”

Like the federal employees who have complained of being left to twist in the wind for months until the breach was acknowledged – and then forced to sit through days of stonewalling while officials revised their stories about how severe the penetration was, and how many people were affected – Chaffetz does not seem impressed with the transparency or vigor of the Administration’s response.

The first reports of the massive penetration of Office of Personnel Management files and security clearance applications — apparently by Chinese hackers most likely working for, or with, that country’s military intelligence apparatus — included grumbles from the affected employees that the administration didn’t handle the situation very well.

The Sunday Times of London published a report on Sunday saying British intelligence has cancelled “live operations in hostile countries” and recalled its agents after Russia and China successfully cracked over a million classified files stolen by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Kaspersky Lab ZAO, one of the top anti-virus firms in the world, claims to have discovered a virus favored by Israeli intelligence in the computer systems of three luxury hotels used for nuclear negotiations with Iran. If this discovery is verified and definitively linked to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, it would represent the first concrete evidence that Israel was spying on the negotiations, as everyone informally assumes they were doing.

The big question about the massive data breach of the U.S. federal government, perpetrated in April but just revealed to the American public yesterday, is whether the Chinese government was responsible.

The French government has released some stunning figures to illustrate the intensity of ISIS recruiting efforts in their country. There are at least 2,600 websites in French, run by the terror state and its supporters, and they generate over 40,000 Twitter messages per day, reaching some 2.8 million followers.

This could be one of the most devastating blows yet struck in the shadowy First Cyber War. The Associated Press reports “the Obama administration is scrambling to assess the impact of a massive data breach involving the agency that handles security clearances and employee records.”

German officials confirmed that hackers have managed to obtain access to the internal server of the German Bundestag, the national legislature. The breach occurred two weeks ago. Details remain unclear about what data the hackers took and how sensitive the data is.

A Belgian security officer—apparently the equivalent of a neighborhood watch patrolman—identified only as “Mohammed N.,” launched a vicious anti-Semitic tirade on Facebook last Friday. “The word Jew itself is dirty,” he wrote. “If I were in Israel, frankly, I would do to the Jews what they do with the Palestinians — slaughter each and every one of them.”

Thousands of military hackers in North Korea could launch cyber attacks that could “kill people and destroy cities”, a defector has warned.

The IRS had been warned of vulnerabilities in their computer system long before the taxing agency admitted this week that it had been hacked and may have lost the data of up to 100,000 American taxpayers.

A team of researchers have developed a hacker-resistant device that could bring online voting to America. A prototype pin-pad device the size of a credit card, DuVote, reportedly allows citizens to securely vote in elections, even if their computer is completely controlled by nefarious hackers.

Many experts reckon the first cyberwar is already well under way. It’s not exactly a “cold war,” as the previous generation understood the term, because serious damage valued in millions of dollars has been done, and there’s nothing masked about the hostile intent of state-sponsored hackers. What has been masked is the sponsorship.

Researchers are discovering that free WiFi networks are so easy to breach that anyone using one is leaving their computer and other electronic devices open to hacking.

The Washington Post’s mobile website was briefly hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army on Thursday. Visitors were greeted with pop-up messages containing anti-U.S. and anti-Saudi propaganda, such as “US govt is training the terrorists to kill more Syrians” and “Saudi Arabia and its allies are killing hundreds of Yemens people everyday!”

According to the St. Lucia News Online, Islamic State hackers were able to seize control of the official website for the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines (commonly abbreviated as “SVG”) in the Lesser Antilles.

“Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged,” The New York Times reported over the weekend, based on comments from “senior American officials briefed on the investigation.”

As information slowly trickled out about Russian hacker attacks on major government systems — first the State Department, then the White House — it seemed only a matter of time until the Pentagon admitted it had been hacked as well.

Access to the Vatican website, www.vatican.va, was blocked twice in the space of 24 hours this week following Pope Francis’s comments Sunday regarding the Armenian genocide.

Investor’s Business Daily published a long article on Tuesday night, collecting the opinions of current and former intelligence officials about the national security threat posed by Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Islamist hackers took control of a government website this morning, posting an image of Saddam Hussein and criticism of Britain’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq – all set against a black background. The UK Air website, run by

Despite the best efforts of Internet porn users to mask their web history, it may be possible for hackers to trace and expose every porn site visited.

The hacker group Anonymous released a message this week threatening to unleash an “electronic Holocaust” — yes, they used that word — on Israel, just a week before Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton risked national security, and completely destroyed public accountability, for what she claims in her defense was a trifling matter of personal convenience. She’s not qualified to hold any position of trust whatsoever with such astoundingly poor judgment.

English Pop singer Lily Allen was targeted by a person claiming to be associated with ISIS on Friday, who, through a series of text messages, threatened to both rape and behead her.

The CyberCaliphate, an ISIS-affiliated hacker group, is sure to make a great deal of American blood boil with their latest stunt: they hijacked the Twitter account of a support group for called Military Spouses of Strength, which “aims to improve mental health awareness by providing resources and knowledge through tangible programming” in the words of their mission statement.

ISIS has been catching hell from hackers, especially after the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo magazine staffers in Paris, but the Islamic State has not been without its own cyber-war victories. On Tuesday, as the Washington Examiner reports, hackers claiming to work for the Islamic State managed to gain control of the Twitter account for Newsweek, using it to post enemy propaganda, documents ostensibly stolen from the U.S. military, threats of further “cyber jihad,” and even a blood-curdling threat against the Obama family.

The UK Mirror reports a hacking crossfire between Anonymous Protection—a branch of famed hacker collective Anonymous—and the Lizard Squad, which has lately been renting itself out as a band of cyber-attack mercenaries, while threatening to release nude photos of singer Taylor Swift in its spare time.

ISIS hackers–or hackers supporting the terror group–struck again this week, shutting down the website of the foreign aid and disaster relief California nonprofit Giving Children Hope, replacing the homepage with a black screen and the words “i love isis.”

A 22-year-old man with alleged ties to the hacking group Lizard Squad, which claimed responsibility for the attack on Sony and Microsoft on Christmas Day, has been arrested in London after an investigation into PayPal thefts.

Given the size of the user base for major shopping and entertainment websites like Amazon.com, Walmart, Xbox Live, and Hulu, the odds that your account was compromised by the antics of hacker group Anonymous are very low.

A hacker group calling itself Lizard Squad on Twitter apparently overloaded the Xbox Live and PlayStation Networks to prevent gamers from using their toys on Christmas.