Free Republic

The federal court case against Imran Awan, the former IT aide to congressional Democrats, has been hit with repeated delays over the last six months -- a situation fueled by allegations in the media that, according to his attorney, have piqued the curiosity of prosecutors. Since November, a judge has postponed Awan’s court hearing in U.S. District Court five times at the request of the prosecution and defense. The latest postponement came Thursday, when the judge pushed Friday’s scheduled hearing to June 7. In an interview Thursday with Fox News, Awan’s attorney, Christopher J. Gowen, blamed the delays on the...

Problematic, in a very big way even if the offer was made.Qatar’s ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS aren’t news. They’ve effectively served as intermediaries in everything from ransom exchanges for hostages to Taliban negotiations. But actually trying to secure terrorist swaps for prisoners on their own behalf would have been a new frontier. Before he was released from a U.S. maximum-security prison last week, a confessed al Qaeda sleeper agent was offered up in a potential prisoner swap that would have freed two Americans held abroad.According to two individuals with direct knowledge of the case, the proposition was...

A long time ago when I was young I had a job in the military where we were exposed to, used, and changed encryption codes. Compared to today, I assume the methods were primitive, clumsy, and time consuming. This brings us to current events. The use of a private server to handle email for the former Secretary of State may seem to some to be OK, after all, she didn't send many classified emails. But let us assume this, those emails that were unclassified and were sent to her from various people at State and perhaps other places probably has...

MSNBC host Joy Reid has tried to douse the controversy surrounding homophobic posts that an Internet archive search found on a blog she managed more than a decade ago by claiming hackers had manipulated the blog to insert offensive material. In a statement Monday to Mediaite, Reid claimed an “unknown, external party” accessed her now-defunct blog and added “offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.” Reid claimed she discovered the hacks after she began working with “a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity.” But Reid’s claims have been met...

MSNBC host Joy Reid blamed hackers for placing homophobic remarks and jokes on her now-defunct blog between 2005 and 2007, but an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation and a cyber security expert raises serious doubts on the veracity of her claims. On April 19, left-wing Twitter user @Jamie_Maz resurfaced archived posts of Reid’s old blog, The Reid Report, showing her accusing prominent political figures of being gay, saying she was repulsed by the thought of sex between two gay men, and describing herself as “probably” homophobic. The posts were similar in substance to homophobic posts that Reid admitted...

Clare W. Bronfman, an heiress of the Seagram Company business empire, allegedly implanted a "key logger" virus on the computer of her late father, Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., so officials with the NXIVM corporation could secretly monitor his emails, including his exchanges with world leaders and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to court records. The extraordinary allegations are attributed to Kristen M. Keeffe, who was part of the inner circle that ran NXIVM, a "human development" organization that has been described by one expert as an "extreme cult." The accusations by Keeffe are contained in a transcript of a...

During the first Cold War, American and British spies would sometimes place coded messages in newspaper classified ads to communicate with each other. And according to new reports in the New York Times and The Intercept, the National Security Agency (NSA) has updated the tactic, using its public Twitter account to send secret messages to at least one Russian spy.... According to the reports, the unnamed Russian met with US spies in person in Germany, and the NSA sometimes communicated with the Russian spy by sending roughly a dozen coded messages from the NSA’s Twitter account. The one important question.......

The Department of Justice has alleged that nine hackers with ties to the Iranian government engaged in a massive cybertheft scheme to steal scientific data and intellectual property from hundreds of U.S. and foreign universities, private companies and government agencies.

Two new reports have found out just how much your data is worth on the Dark Web. Content marketing agency Fractl analyzed, over several days last month, all of the fraud-related listings on three Dark Web marketplaces — Dream, Point and Wall Street Market – the results of which were obtained via MarketWatch. MarketWatch indicates that an individual’s Gmail account can be purchased for as little as $1, while Facebook credentials go for around $5.20. Paypal accounts average $247.00.

Alexander Downer — the Australian diplomat whose tip to the FBI about a London pub conversation led to the massive probe of allegations of collusions between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia — is himself closely tied to a Chinese firm experts say is deeply involved in espionage against America. Just last month, all six top U.S. intelligence bosses warned Americans against using digital telecommunications equipment produced by Chinese smartphone producer Huawei.

The Clintons created a media and law enforcement echo chamber of Russia collusion. Earlier this week we wrote about the possible involvement of Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal in feeding information to Christoper Steele, author of the infamous Clinton/DNC funded dossier. That dossier formed a key part of the FBI’s presentation to the FISA court to obtain a warrant to surveil Carter Page.One of the key links in the Blumenthal-Steele stories was former State Department employee Jonathan Winer: Devin Nunes has a new target: Jonathan Winer, the Obama State Department’s special envoy to Libya, and longtime Senate aide to John...

A day before she resigned as White House communications director, Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee last week that one of her email accounts was hacked, according to people who were present for her testimony in the panel's Russia probe. Under relatively routine questioning from Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., about her correspondence, Hicks indicated that she could no longer access two accounts: one she used as a member of President Donald Trump's campaign team and the other a personal account, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the closed meeting of the Intelligence Committee...

For Google's Security and Privacy Month, we are honored to present the real Frank Abagnale, Renowned Cybersecurity And Fraud Prevention Expert, Bestselling Author ...

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday announced he would create a task force to examine how his Justice Department can better combat global cyber threats, including efforts to interfere with elections or damage critical infrastructure.

A huge range of security exploits, said to be worth over $2m if sold on the black market, have been leaked online.The tools are said to have been created by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and accompanying documents appear to indicate a possible breach of the Swift global banking system.Such a hack could have enabled the US to covertly monitor financial transactions, researchers said.The files were released by Shadow Brokers, a hacking group that has previously leaked malware.If genuine, it represents perhaps the most significant exposure of NSA files since the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013.On Twitter, Mr Snowden...

Hackers using a tool stolen from the United States government conducted extensive cyberattacks on Friday that hit dozens of countries around the world, severely disrupting Britain’s public health system and wreaking havoc on computers elsewhere, including Russia. The tool was leaked by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which has been dumping stolen N.S.A. hacking tools online since last year. Microsoft rolled out a patch for the vulnerability in March, but hackers apparently took advantage of the fact that vulnerable targets — particularly hospitals — had yet to update their systems. The malware was circulated by email. Targets were...

After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials. The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was...

HILLARY CLIP In case some of you had missed this, here it is again. This clip was provided to Trey Gowdy's committee investigators over 2 1/2 years ago, they acknowledged receipt, and we discussed it on the phone. The clip is from a 2000 fundraiser at Wolfgang Puck's Spago in Beverly Hills. Hilly is sitting between Peter Paul and Spiderman Stan Lee and the discussion turns to email. It is difficult to understand it completely, but Hillary is saying that, because of investigations, why would I want to use email......can you imagine? Fast forward to when she started at State....

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...

Like the Meltdown bug, the Spectre bug is a hardware bug in the form of a CPU design flaw. Unlike the Meltdown bug which only affects Intel processors, the Spectre bug impacts Intel, AMD, and some ARM (used in many smart phones and other mobile devices) processors. These three are by far the most common CPUs on the planet, running literally billions of devices. In a Spectre attack, the CPU is tricked into executing instructions that it normally would not, causing leaks in the victims memory address space.