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Pro-Assad computer hackers today broke into the Marine Corps recruiting website, redirecting visitors to a screed that called President Barack Obama "a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue al- Qaida insurgents." A Marine Corps spokesman confirmed that the site, marines.com, was tampered with and redirected temporarily, but no information was put at risk.

NEW YORK (MainStreet)—It used to be the stuff of science fiction and Dick Tracy comic strips. But fiction became fact and Mobile Personal Communication Devices (MPCDs) are commonplace. Now they are used for more than mere conversation. Mobile financial transactions are routine. They are even beginning to replace wallets. But as wallets go high tech, so do criminals. The advent of mobile wallets is creating ... http://www.mainstreet.com/article/smart-spending/technology/beware-vulnerability-cyber-pickpocketing

AUGUST 1--As a notorious hacker seeks to distribute “very personal” e-mails sent to Colin Powell by a female Romanian diplomat, the retired general is denying that he engaged in an extramarital affair with the woman while he served as Secretary of State, though he recently advised her to delete all their online exchanges, The Smoking Gun has learned. In a statement addressing his relationship with Corina Cretu, a member of the European Parliament who previously held a series of senior posts in the Romanian government, Powell, 76, wrote that he has known Cretu for about 10 years, having first met...

Journalist Michael Hastings was killed early Tuesday morning in a bizarre car incident in Los Angeles. Hastings, 33, was best known for writing the Rolling Stone story that ended in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resignation as head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Hastings’ final story, “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” was a searing take on the NSA snooping scandal, which Hastings described as “North Korea-esque.” Hastings pulled no punches as he linked the NSA scandal to the Department of Justice’s spying on reporters and the IRS abuse scandal. Hastings built a case that the same Democrats who turned Bush-era...

CBS News reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, one of the very few real reporters left in the mainstream media, appeared on Monday’s O’Reilly Factor, telling Bill O’Reilly that she thinks she knew who hacked her computer (scroll down for video). In the interview, Attkisson begins by explaining that both her personal computer, as well as her CBS work computer would mysteriously turn on in the middle of the night, even though she’d shut them down...

WASHINGTON - Several key elements in the bombshell story about the government's secret surveillance programs have been either underreported or left out of the narrative altogether. The first is the degree to which all three branches of the government -- executive, legislative and judicial -- oversee these programs. The second is how did a little-known, low-level, 29-year-old, high school drop out with no academic or work credentials to speak of gain access to America's most critical national security secrets. The first element, often completely missing from network nightly news stories, is that surveillance programs such as these are being closely...

PC World - Thursday afternoon, a bombshell dropped: Two leading reports claimed that the U.S. government has been spying on emails, searches, Skype calls, and other electronic communications used by Americans for the last several years, via a program known as PRISM. [ALSO: Prism leaker steps forward] According to the reports, the Web's largest names--AOL, Apple, Facebook,A Google, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk, Yahoo, and YouTube--participated, perhaps unwittingly. (Dropbox will reportedly be added as well.) The report claims that the National Security Agency had "direct access" to servers owned by those companies. Most, if not all, of those companies have denied participating...

Bradley Manning proved that massive amounts of the government's most secret data was vulnerable to being dumped on the open Internet. A single individual achieved that unprecedented leak. According to the Washington Post, "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances." And this week, we learned that the FBI, CIA and NSA were unable to protect some of their most closely held secrets from Glenn Greenwald, Richard Engel, Robert Windrem, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras. Those journalists, talented as they are, possess somewhat fewer resources than foreign governments! So...

Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals. The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) "can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging". It says the government will "identify potential targets of...

“If you want to avoid having your identity stolen, use long passwords that contain digits, punctuation and no recognizable words. Make up a different password for every Web site. And change all of your passwords every 30 days.” Have these security pundits ever listened to themselves? That advice is clearly unfollowable. I currently have account names and passwords for 87 Web sites (banks, airlines, blogs, shopping, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter). How is anyone — even a security professional — supposed to memorize 87 long, complex password strings, let alone remember which goes with which Web site? So most people use the...

Microsoft Security Essentials just detected about 6 attemps at *Trojan: Win32/Jpgiframe.A* trying to install on *latest post* page.

Chinese Hackers Have Stolen Plans For Pretty Much The Entire US Military Geoffrey Ingersoll May 28, 2013, 11:11 AM Hackers have accessed designs for more than two dozen major U.S. weapons systems, according to a devastating classified report from a Pentagon advisor shared with the Washington Post. Although the report from the Defense Science Board did not identify the hackers, senior military and industry officials with knowledge of the breaches say they come primarily from China, according to Ellen Nakashima of the Post. A public version of the report released in January warned of an "existential cyber attack" with "potentially...

For the first time the Obama administration has explicitly accused China’s military of hacking into computer systems of the U.S. government and its defense contractors. "The accusations relayed in the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities were remarkable in their directness," writes David Sanger of The New York Times.

Associated Press says its Twitter account has been hacked, as the Twitter feed falsely said that there had been two explosions at the White House.

The controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) just passed the U.S. House, and will now head to the upper Senate chamber for further deliberation. Rinse and repeat. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it still poses a major threat to Fourth Amendment rights, according to civil liberties campaigners. The bill was passed 288-127 in favor of the bill after two days of debate and discussion on the House floor. Only 18 members of the House abstained from the vote. CISPA will allow private sector firms to search personal and sensitive user data of ordinary U.S....

Summary: Dubbed as one of the most privacy infringing pieces of legislation ever to have hit the Capitol, what exactly is CISPA, and how does it affect you?Described as "misguided" and "fatally flawed" by the two largest U.S. privacy groups, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) threatens the online privacy of ordinary U.S. residents more so than any other bill since Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008. A lot of confusion still surrounds what CISPA can do, who it affects, and what it will practically achieve. Here's what you need to know. What is CISPA?CISPA,...

The Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. Asked if the Data Center would hold the data of American citizens,  Alexander said, "No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens," adding that the NSA staff "take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, " Thomas Drake who worked at the NSA says Americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the name of security. The only way you can have perfect security is have a perfect surveillance state....

(snip) Considering this deluge of aggressive and costly security breaches, it’s no wonder that some people are getting frustrated enough to contemplate striking back directly against our attackers. While giving cyber criminals a taste of their own medicine certainly sounds appealing, most forms of so-called "Strikeback" have no place in private business. ...... What’s Wrong With Strikeback?Unfortunately, direct strikeback measures have huge inherent risks:. Targeting: The biggest problem with strikeback is that the Internet provides anonymity, making it very hard to know who’s really behind an attack. It's all too likely that strikebacks could impact innocent victims. For example, attackers...

Pause and reflect on this hypocrisy: The Department of Justice prosecutes young hackers who use computers to promote free speech while highly educated adults within the DOJ threaten to use lethal drone force against American citizens without due process. Which is worse? Certainly, I do not condone hacking. However, you and I need to start talking about the best way to handle cyber-attacks while also recognizing that the same government officials we trust to protect us are assaulting our constitutional freedoms. Last month, cyber security firm Mandiant released an explosive, 76-page report indicating that the Chinese government is most likely...

The U.S. Government has decided to expand a program that scans Internet traffic in and out of defense contractors to include more private, civilian-run operations. Now more private sector employees will have their emails and Internet activities scanned. Those affected include big banks, utilities and transportation companies. Under last month's White House executive order on cybersecurity, the scans will be driven by classified information provided by U.S. intelligence agencies — including data from the National Security Agency (NSA) — on new or especially serious espionage threats and other hacking attempts. U.S. spy chiefs said on March 12 that cyber attacks...