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A secret memo marked “URGENT” detailed how the House Democratic Caucus’s server went “missing” soon after it became evidence in a cybersecurity probe. The secret memo also said more than “40 House offices may have been victims of IT security violations.” In the memo, Congress’s top law enforcement official, Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, along with Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, wrote, “We have concluded that the employees [Democratic systems administrator Imran Awan and his family] are an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems ... shortly after an IG report came...

Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper says the use of human sources is "the most benign form of information gathering" amid President Trump's persistent outcry over the FBI's use of an informant during its investigation into connections between Russians and members of the Trump campaign... ...Clapper told "Face the Nation" that as DNI during the Obama administration, he would not have known about any FBI informant or their decision to use a human source.

Former President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity czar confirmed Wednesday that former national security adviser Susan Rice told him to “stand down” in response to Russian cyber attacks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Michael Daniel, whose official title was “cybersecurity coordinator,” confirmed the stand-down order during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing held to review the Obama and President Donald Trump’s administrations’ policy response to Russian election interference. Rice’s order to Daniel was first reported in “Russian Roulette,” a book published in March that details Russia’s meddling in the election. In the book, authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn reported that...

Bank robberies aren’t as exciting as they used to be when they were the stuff of Ocean’s Eleven style, or the coarser Bonnie and Clyde. No more black balaclavas or dead president masks. No more guns, no more physical threats. This is the age of the cyber thief, and Mexico’s recent $110-million bank heist didn’t even require a criminal to touch the money at all. With a push of a button it was gone--almost. Gone, too, is the excitement of getting caught up in a bank robbery as dramatized on television. But the lack of physical excitement also means that...

The Capitol Police turned over a trove of evidence in the alleged Imran Awan House cyberbreach and theft case to the defense attorneys when they were supposed to deliver it to prosecutors instead, according to court documents and a source. And hours after The Daily Caller News Foundation asked prosecutors about the disclosure, Awan’s lawyer said he had learned of the forthcoming story from a source on Capitol Hill. TheDCNF had not told anyone other than prosecutors about it. “The cop came to [Awan’s defense attorney] Chris Gowen’s office with a stack of papers … Then he came back and...

Working with dubious sourcing, a group close to NATO's chief military commander Philip Breedlove sought to secure weapons deliveries for Ukraine, a trove of newly released emails revealed. The efforts served to intensify the conflict between the West and Russia. Most of the 1,096 hacked emails date back to the dramatic 12 months of the Ukraine crisis after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Thousands died in the skirmishes between Kiev's troops and Moscow-aligned separatists. More than 2 million civilians fled eastern Ukraine. Breedlove sought counsel from some very prominent people, his emails show. Among them were Wesley Clark, Breedlove's...

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, is believed to have provided the agency’s top-secret information to WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors acknowledged in a hearing in January. The anti-secrecy group published the code under the label “Vault 7” in March 2017. It was one of the most significant and potentially damaging leaks in the CIA’s history, exposing secret cyberweapons and spying techniques that might be used against the United States, according to current and former intelligence officials.

As part of National Security Adviser John Bolton's full overhaul of the National Security Council, he's "leading the push to abolish the role of special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator," the top White House cybersecurity job, Politico reports, citing one current and two former U.S. officials. One of the former officials said there's a "60-40" chance the White House eliminates the job, potentially leaving the U.S. government rudderless heading into elections in which Russia is widely expected to meddle.

Senior North Korean espionage official 'may have fled to Britain after defecting' By Julian Ryall, tokyo 3 MAY 2018 • 4:51AM North Korea has launched an international manhunt for one of its most senior counter-espionage officers, who disappeared in late February and is believed to have defected, possibly to Britain, according to a media report in South Korea. The official has been identified as a Mr Kang, a colonel in his 50s with the Ministry of State Security and responsible for monitoring dissident and espionage efforts in Russia, China and south-east Asia. He disappeared from the Zhongpu International Hotel in...

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...