Free Republic

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, the country’s military intelligence service. Some of the...

A major cryptocurrency exchange says it was the victim of a sophisticated hack that stole about $1.5 billion worth of digital currency, marking one of the biggest online thefts of all time. Bybit said Friday that a routine transfer of Ethereum, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, between digital wallets was “manipulated” by an attacker who transferred the crypto to an unidentified address. The company sought to reassure customers that their cryptocurrency holdings with the exchange were safe. The company added that news of the hack had led to a surge in withdrawal requests and there could be delays in...

WASHINGTON — Former chief information security officer (CISO) for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense is headed back to the Pentagon — this time as DoD’s CISO — following her previous suspension from the department for allegedly disclosing classified data.Katie Arrington served as a state lawmaker for South Carolina and had an unsuccessful bid for Congress before taking her post in 2019 as the chief information officer for A&S during President Donald Trump’s first administration. She played an active role in standing up the department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program before she was put on administrative leave...

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

(formerly Twitter) is experiencing its third major outage of the day, with users reporting widespread login and loading issues. The hacking group Dark Storm Team has reportedly claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on the platform, according to a public Telegram post. Newsweek has reached out to the X via email for comment on the matter. What to know: More than 40,000 reports flooded Downdetector during the second outage. The current outage peaked at 29,143 reports and is now slightly declining. Dark Storm Team claims to have targeted X with a cyberattack. Users are unable to access the site, with...

Intelligence firm Graphika said a Beijing-linked campaign known as "Spamouflage" spread disinformation about Spain's deadly floods last year. A Chinese online influence operation impersonated a human rights group in Spain to spread calls on social media for the Spanish government to be overthrown following deadly floods in Valencia last year, according to research by intelligence firm Graphika. The Chinese state-linked campaign — dubbed "Spamouflage" by analysts — posed as the Spain-based NGO Safeguard Defenders on social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok and X to circulate content criticising the government's response to the floods that killed at least 225 people last...

Gelsinger took to X on Monday to suggest that the market's assumptions were wrong. He said that instead of reducing demand, making computing "dramatically cheaper" and more efficient to use — as DeepSeek appears to have done — "will expand the market for it." The former Intel boss, who retired from the company in December after struggling to capitalize on the AI boom, also suggested that the Chinese engineers at DeepSeek "had limited resources, and they had to find creative solutions" to squeeze performance out of their models. The AI industry has insisted that models become smarter when powered with...

BREAKING: TikTok has shut down in the U.S.

The FBI has unveiled details of a massive international cyberattack orchestrated by the Chinese hacker group Mustang Panda, which used the PlugX malware to compromise thousands of computers in at least 170 countries. According to the Justice Department, the group—described as “PRC state-sponsored hackers”—is funded by the Chinese government and has primarily targeted European government devices. Since 2014, Mustang Panda has utilized PlugX malware to infiltrate government and business systems across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The malware, initially designed to exploit Windows-based devices, was modified in 2020 to spread via USB flash drives. Thousands of devices, including many home...

A major Russian telecommunications company appears to have begun providing an Internet connection to North Korea. The new link supplements one from China and will provide back-up to Pyongyang at a time the US government is reportedly attacking its Internet infrastructure and pressuring China to end all business with North Korea. The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening. Internet routing databases map the thousands of connections between telecom providers and enable computers to figure out the best route to a destination. Until now, Internet...

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...

ISRAEL has accused Iran and Hezbollah of a twisted cyber attack where phones across the country were flooded with sick messages. One of the texts read "Say goodbye to your loved ones", while another said "Don't worry, you will hug them in hell". The Cyber Directorate said Israelis were sent three versions of the messages, all containing harmful links to unknown websites. The links were made inactive within a short period of time, the Directorate said. A statement from the army read: ..."Since this afternoon, the IAF has struck approximately 100 launchers and additional terrorist infrastructure sites, consisting of approximately...

“The Land the Law Forgot,” is what liberal legal scholar Jonathan Turley called New York in June. Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t have laws; it’s got so many, in fact, that studies found it to be our country’s least free state. It’s that N.Y.’s supposed law enforcers are ideological enforcers, using and going beyond the Empire State’s surfeit of strictures to build an empire of left-wing conformity. Letitia James’ Vendetta And now Letitia James, the notorious N.Y. attorney general who tag-teamed with a judge to try to pummel former President Donald Trump, has claimed another scalp: nonprofit anti-(destructive)immigration entity...

A Chinese Private security contractor linked to communist China’s top policing agency suffered a major leak this week, as hundreds of private documents exposed the country’s surveillance tactics against dissidents, and also its cyber warfare capabilities for a potential cyberattack against its adversaries like the United States, as it enters most important election in history. The Security contractor, I-Soon, which has ties to the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), suffered a leak of private documents showing it provided the Chinese government with powerful tools to target dissidents, anti-government activists, and ethnic minorities such as Muslims.

Documents leaked by whistleblower angry over Ukraine warPrivate Moscow consultancy bolstering Russian cyberwarfareTools support hacking operations and attacks on infrastructureDocuments linked to notorious Russian hacking group Sandworm...Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations... The software engineers behind these systems are employees of NTC Vulkan. On the surface, it looks like a run-of-the-mill cybersecurity consultancy. However, a leak of secret files from the company has exposed its work bolstering Vladimir Putin’s cyberwarfare capabilities.

Chris Krebs has stated in the past and testified yesterday that there was no voter fraud through “hacking” that occurred during the 2020 election. For complete transparency, I did not watch his testimony nor have a read a transcript. Why would I? This is the same guy who didn’t notice the largest cyber-attack in world history happening against multiple federal agencies for months.Krebs was fired last month from his position as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The agency is tasked with preventing the exact type of massive cyberattack that has been underway since March, perhaps earlier....

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

National security adviser John Bolton defended his decision to eliminate a cybersecurity coordinator position at the White House, saying he "fixed" an overstaffing issue and that, "You know, the whole thing works." “I inherited a structure in the national security staff that was duplicative and overlapping," Bolton told reporters in a briefing Thursday. Bolton, who took office in April, said cutting the job in May did not negatively impact the National Security Council's ability to craft cybersecurity policy and respond to threats.

Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson is more concerned about a cyberattack crippling the government than another Jan. 6-type assault on the Capitol, she said in an interview aired Saturday on CNN. “Our networks ... have attempted intrusions every single day. And so, cybersecurity for me is a much greater concern than the prospect of thousands of people storming the West Terrace,” Gibson said. Gibson’s comments come in wake of several significant cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, including a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline that crippled East Coast fuel supply last month and another on a major U.S. meat...

Today we saw some important testimony in the Michael Sussmann case. First, Rodney Joffe, an FBI confidential human source, went around his FBI handler to relay dubious Alfa Bank information to a friend at the FBI. Second, there were indications that Joffe previously worked on Russia cyber security matters. This leads us to ask whether Joffe was in some way involved in the Trump/Russia investigation. More on that below. The testimony of retired FBI Agent Tom Grasso. Grasso, a witness for Sussmann, was a Special Agent with the FBI whose “primary responsibility involved investigating cyber crimes.” He was part of...