Free Republic

The FBI is struggling to recruit bright young computer programmers because of their fondness for cannabis, according to the bureau’s director. Under current rules, the FBI cannot hire anyone who has smoked marijuana in the last three years—a policy that rules out many of the best recent graduates. “I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” said James Comey, the FBI’s director. …

Given how hard antivirus software makers push you to sign up, you'd think that business was booming. Far from it, according to Symantec’s Brian Dye. He tells the Wall Street Journal that antivirus tools like his company’s Norton suite are effectively “dead.” The utilities now catch less than half of all attacks, according to the executive—to him, the focus is on minimizing the damage whenever there’s a successful hack or infection. …

Target’s massive data breach has now cost the company's CEO his job. Target announced Monday that Chairman, President and CEO Gregg Steinhafel is out nearly five months after the retailer disclosed the breach, which has hurt its reputation among customers and has derailed its business. […] Steinhafel’s tenure has been tested with many challenges, from a weak economy to a proxy fight. The company, known for its cheap chic clothing and home decor, has seen uneven sales since the recession ended and has battled a perception that its prices aren’t as low as its rivals. …

This is an advance notification for one out-of-band security bulletin that Microsoft is intending to release on May 1, 2014. The bulletin addresses the security vulnerability in Internet Explorer described in Microsoft Security Advisory 2963983.

An Israeli hacker team published on Tuesday images and personal details of members of the Anonymous hacker collective who participated in the OpIsrael attack against Israeli sites earlier this week, Israel’s Channel 2 reported. Israeli Elite Force gained access to the computers of 16 Anonymous members and was able to capture screenshots and photos of the anti-Israel hackers with their own webcams. The Israeli team published the information in a Dropbox document via their Facebook page, saying, “Anonymous, next time do not mess with us.” The file includes the names of the attackers, their countries of origin, and usernames and...

Without personally knowing any cyber criminals (I think using hackers is unfair to… well, hackers), we can probably assume they are not very different from other criminals in that they do what they do for a few basic reasons: •Ego: defacing websites to gain street cred •Ideology: wreaking havoc to make political statements or wage asymmetric warfare •Money: engaging in good old-fashioned criminal capitalism (to the tune of $3 trillion) It’s this third motivation that is in the news the most, and it’s not because these criminals are infiltrating banks and making off with the loot. In fact it’s...

U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move likely to please international critics but alarm many business leaders and others who rely on smooth functioning of the Web. Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year.

SNIPPET: "Security concerns ahead of this summer's Brazilian World Cup have increased after a football fan was beaten to death in host city Sao Paulo." SNIPPET: "There are serious concerns about the safety of travelling supporters at this summer's World Cup after more than 30 people were killed in 2013 as a result of football-related violence. One of Brazil’s biggest criminal gangs last year promised a ‘Tournament of Terror’. The threat was issued by Sau Paulo's 'First Capital of the Command', who in 2012 was a group behind the murder of more than a hundred of the city’s police officers."

Security researchers have discovered a potentially dangerous flaw in airport x-ray machines that would allow hackers to pass deadly weapons through security. Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle of security firm Qualys discovered that a training function called Threat Image Projection, which superimposes fake images of contraband on the screen to train security personnel, could be manipulated to work in reverse, and project images of weapon-free luggage over top of the real thing. The training software is present in all TSA scanners, and also on machines deployed in government buildings, embassies, courthouses, ports and border crossings. …

SOCHI, Russia, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Irina Rodnina, the figure skater who lit the Olympic flame at the Sochi Games, blamed hackers on Monday for a tweet about U.S. President Barack Obama that caused a racism row. Some Western media questioned the choice of Russia's triple Olympic champion Rodnina featuring in the climax of the Games opening ceremony on Friday. A tweet on her timeline last year showed a picture of Obama which was photoshopped to add a banana in the foreground. The image angered many including the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who called it "outrageous behaviour"....

These credit cards are dinosaurs. Every credit card in the U.S. will be replaced by October 2015 with new cards that contain the chip-and-PIN technology that the rest of the world has had for years, according to the Wall Street Journal. Both Visa and MasterCard are committed to the switch, which will render extinct the plastic in your wallets and purses right now. No more black magnetic stripes; no more signing on the dotted line. Americans who have traveled to Europe in recent years will know that the U.S.'s credit card system is embarrassingly old-fashioned by comparison. It's often difficult...

SNIPPET: "Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics security will be beefed up following Boston Marathon explosions, officials say Russian sports officials said they will beef up security at forthcoming sports events and the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games in the wake of deadly explosions at Boston's marathon that killed three people, and injured over 140 others." "Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics security will be beefed up following Boston Marathon explosions, officials say" SNIPPET: "The World Athletics Championship takes place in Moscow on Aug 10-18, and the event is seen as a dress rehearsal for the 2014 Winter Games in the Black Sea resort...

Debacle: U.S. intelligence agencies report that developers linked to the Belarus government helped create the Healthcare.gov website and may have inserted malicious code making it vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking. The disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov was bad enough. But as if Americans need another reason to avoid Healthcare.gov, we now hear that the Obama administration, through the Department of Health and Human Services, has indirectly contracted with developers in the worker's paradise of Belarus, a former Soviet republic still closely tied to Russia, to write some of the software code used for the website. The Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz...

Remember when John McAfee warned us in November that anybody who signed up to the Obamacare site might have their bank account cleaned-out by hackers? The eccentric genius and former fugitive called the government website 'a hacker's wet dream', adding that there were 'NO safeguards' that would stop someone from starting a fake Obamacare website 'for a couple hundred dollars' that could 'empty your bank account' in hours.  McAfee added unambiguously that 'It's going to happen, and it's going to happen soon... nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this.'  And I thought he was just trying to sell...

It was, in essence, a cybercriminal's dream. For months, an amorphous group of Eastern European hackers had been poking around the networks of major U.S. retailers, searching for loose portals that would take them deep into corporate systems. In early November, before the holiday shopping season began, the hackers found what they had been looking for -- a wide path into Target and beyond. Entering through a digital gateway, the criminals discovered that Target's systems were astonishingly open -- lacking the virtual walls and motion detectors found in secure networks like many banks'. Without those safeguards, the thieves moved swiftly...

Nearly all of the ATMs in the world are running the Windows XP operating system, introduced by Microsoft 13 years ago—and incredibly out of date, as any tech enthusiast will tell you. On April 8, Microsoft will officially end the tech support for the aging OS, which was replaced by Windows Vista in 2007, Windows 7 in 2009, Windows 8 in 2012 and Windows 8.1 in 2013. […] If an ATM isn’t upgraded, it will continue to function, experts said. Withdrawals, deposits, and other transactions will work as they did before. But the machines will be more vulnerable to cyber...

The holiday data breach at Target Corp. appeared to be part of a broad and highly sophisticated international hacking campaign against multiple retailers, according to a report prepared by federal and private investigators that was sent to financial-services companies and retailers. […] Parts of the malicious computer code used against Target’s credit-card readers had been on the Internet’s black market since last spring and were partly written in Russian, people familiar with the report said. Both details suggest the attack may have ties to organized crime in the former Soviet Union, former U.S. officials said. …

Cybersecurity researchers slammed HealthCare.gov's security during a House hearing on Thursday morning, saying the site is still riddled with problems that could put consumers' sensitive health details at risk. “The reason we’re concluding that this is so shockingly bad is that the issues across the site are so varied,” David Kennedy, founder of the information security firm TrustedSec, told NBC News. “You don’t even have to hack into the system to see big issues – which means there are [major problems] underneath.” Kennedy was the first of a group of so-called "white-hat hackers" who testified before the House of Representatives...

Credit card hackers might be developing a taste for the finer things in life. Upscale department store Neiman Marcus confirmed that its database of customer information was hacked last month, independent security researcher Brian Krebs reported on Friday. The Neiman Marcus hack follows news today from Target that its investigation into its recent hack found that thieves made off with the personal and credit card data of up to 110 million Target customers, 70 million more than previously thought.

As more and more human rights of U.S. citizens are violated in the name of safety and security, the group Anonymous stands to fight at the side of Americans. Over the holiday weekend, they have even gone as far to announce a call to arms. The fact that many people are still unaware of the “hacker” group Anonymous is sign of censorship by today’s mainstream media. There is a clear need for groups such as Anonymous as the fact of this direct censorships shows just how clouded the media’s freedom of speech has become. anon5 (See also: Obama Secretly Signs...