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A Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee says he is worried that the Russians “never left,” raising the specter that Moscow is looking to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections through cyber or other means. “I am concerned that the Russians never left,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) told CBS News when asked about his concerns about threats to the 2018 midterm elections. Quigley also alleged that Russia-linked hackers breached “somewhere between 20 and 40 state board of elections,” including the Illinois voter database, in 2016 and alleged that states are not prepared for future interference efforts by Russia. “First, they...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI failed to notify scores of U.S. officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year that the targets were in the Kremlin's crosshairs, The Associated Press has found. Nearly 80 interviews with Americans targeted by Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, turned up only two cases in which the FBI had provided a heads-up. Even senior policymakers discovered they were targets only when the AP told them, a situation some described as bizarre and dispiriting. "It's utterly confounding," said Philip Reiner, a...

info a site. Limbaugh discusses our dangerous times.

No excerpts allowed from Bloomberg, story here

Two notorious Russian hackers were fingered by the FBI for playing starring roles in meddling in the U.S. election. Evginey Mikhailovich Bogachev, 33, and Aleksey Alekseyevich Belan, 29, are reported to have made millions by selling financial information they obtained through hacking. Both men have been wanted by the FBI for years but because Russia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S., they remain beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. The naming and shaming comes in the wake of President Barack Obama launching economic and political sanctions against Russians involved in the hack.

A website tied to the hacking scandal of the Democratic Party has now posted a small batch of leaked emails from Republican campaigns and state GOP staffers. The emails on the site, known as DCLeaks, appear to be from state party officials and former Republican presidential candidates, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). The messages range from June to October of 2015. ... Most of the messages coordinate campaign activities, solicit funds, or invite or RSVP to events. The archive is largely the procedural minutia of running campaigns or state parties. The emails include a wide array of constituent email addresses....

The news keeps getting worse. Alarming evidence of how deep the Kremlin’s got its tentacles in Washington mounts by the day. Large-scale hacking by Russian cyber-warriors didn’t just hit the Democratic National Committee, it stole emails from a wide array of top power-players, including the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s military boss. Systematic Russian cyber-attacks on the DNC and related political targets in Washington were detected over a year ago by the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign cyber shenanigans, but the highly classified nature of this intelligence made it difficult to alert Congress about Kremlin espionage. That the Russians...

Russian hackers are believed to have breached the computers of the Clinton Foundation — and appear to be the same cyber spies who swiped confidential files from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton campaigns, officials familiar with the investigation told NBC News. Three private security firms have concluded the hackers are Russian, and some security experts say Russian intelligence could be behind the attacks and want to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. So what could be the hackers' end game? The Democratic National Committee said the operation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. But some U.S. officials believe...

Hillary Clinton is in trouble. Really big trouble. According to the Washington Post, the same prosecutor who took down General David Petraeus for improper possession of classified information is now looking into Hillary Clinton's email server. Earlier this week, an intelligence Inspector General revealed Clinton did in fact have at least four pieces of top secret, classified information passed through and stored on her private email server. The investigation is being overseen by two veteran prosecutors in the Justice Department’s National Security Division. One of them helped manage the prosecution of David H. Petraeus. As a reminder, Petraeus plead guilty...

fficials tell NBC News that Russia launched a "sophisticated cyberattack" against the Pentagon's Joint Staff unclassified email system which has been shut down and taken off line for nearly two weeks. According to the officials, the "sophisticated cyber intrusion" occurred sometime around July 25 and affected some 4-thousand military and civilian personnel work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.

Only a week after Russian "crime syndicates" hacked the IRS database and stole information on the tax returns of more than 100,000 people, China was blamed for "one of the largest thefts of government data ever seen," the Wall Street Journal reports. The data breach allowed Chinese hackers to steal the personal records of about four million people — all either government employees, contractors, or their families. The cyber-attack by Russian hackers is not the first of its kind. The New American reported last year that Russian hackers broke into networks at the White House, and in a separate cyber-attack...

WASHINGTON — Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.

Russian hackers who got into the State Department in recent months used that perch to penetrate sensitive parts of the White House computer system, U.S. officials say.

The hackers are thought to be operating from Russia and appear to have at least loose connections with officials of the Russian government, the people briefed on the matter said. Some American officials speculate that the breach was intended to send a message to Wall Street and the United States about the vulnerability of the digital network of one of the world’s most important banking institutions. “It could be in retaliation for the sanctions” placed on Russia, one senior official briefed on the intelligence said. “But it could be mixed motives — to steal if they can, or to sell...

FUD over the current state of cyber insecurity reached a fever pitch this week as thousands gathered in Las Vegas for Defcon and Black Hat. While the hacking conferences served up their usual paranoia-inducing mix -- demos of Dropcam hacks and warnings that mobile apps are spying on us -- first prize for panic mongering this week goes to the New York Times story on Russian hackers who allegedly amassed 1.2 billion stolen Web credentials and half a billion email addresses. Hold Security, which uncovered the database of stolen info, called it "arguably the largest data breach known to date,"...