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The State Department has informed Congress that it plans to shutter its last two consulates in Russia over caps set by Moscow on the number of diplomats that are allowed in the country. In a letter to congressional leaders sent Dec. 10 and obtained by The Hill, the administration said it will permanently close its Vladivostok consulate and temporarily halt work at the consulate in Yekaterinburg. The letter confirming the closures was sent three days before news broke of a major hack of U.S. government agencies that is believed to have been conducted by an elite Russian cyber espionage unit....

Conservative watchdog group America First Legal unearthed a secret Obama memo that could torpedo Jack Smith’s claims that President Trump didn’t have the authority to possess or retain classified documents. In June Jack Smith indicted Trump on 37 federal counts for storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence. * * * Last week AFL filed a FOIA request against the Defense Department for more information on a secretive committee created by Barack Obama In 2014 Obama created the secretive Presidential Information Technology Committee (PITC) after Russian hackers breached the Executive Office of the President’s network. “Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment...

At least no one can say that the January 6 committee didn’t have an impact! Greg Abbott, Kristi Noem, Henry McMaster, and their families will have to guard against identity theft for the rest of their lives, thanks to the committee’s work in exposing their Social Security numbers. How many numbers got exposed? “Around 1900” of them, according to the Washington Post, which came from White House visitor logs supplied to the committee. The J6 committee failed to redact those from a spreadsheet released to the public as part of its final report on the riot. Ben Carson, a Trump...

A Tennessee-based engineer is being investigated by the Pentagon for a “critical compromise” of communications across 17 Air Force facilities. The unnamed engineer, who hasn’t been formally charged, is alleged to have taken home more than $90,000 worth of government radio technologies and gained “unauthorized administrator access” to the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command (AETC). The security breach comes just three months after a junior Air National Guardsman allegedly leaked a massive number of classified documents online. Jack Teixeira, although relatively low-ranking, used his top-secret security clearance to post hundreds of Ukraine war documents on the Russians and...

The U.S. Department of Defense secured an exposed server on Monday that was spilling internal U.S. military emails to the open internet for the past two weeks. The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud for Department of Defense customers, which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data. The exposed server was part of an internal mailbox system storing about three terabytes of internal military emails, many pertaining to U.S. Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM, the U.S. military unit tasked with conducting...

Washington — Another intruder has breached one of the nation's most sensitive military bases — the home of Air Force One — and this time a resident opened fire on the trespasser, Joint Base Andrews said in a statement late Monday. During the incident, which occurred at about 11:30 a.m. Monday, "a man gained unauthorized access to a JBA housing area," Joint Base Andrews said in the statement posted to Twitter. "A resident discharged a firearm, security forces arrived on scene to apprehend the intruder....

As the November midterm election draws near, the focus is on voting protocols and tools, especially the voting machines themselves. After the 2020 election, many irregularities in voting were documented across the country, some due to mail-in voting, some due to voting rosters, some due to poll workers, and some due to machines that were somehow hacked or compromised in some way. GPB News reports: “Sensitive voting system passwords posted online. copies of confidential voting software are available for download. Ballot counting machines inspected by people not supposed to have access. The list of suspected security breaches at local election...

An affair between two U.K. Royal Navy officers serving on nuclear submarines threatened the security of the country’s nuclear deterrent, according to the judge at a military court. The two individuals have both been formally discharged from the navy and have received suspended prison sentences. Details of the 2020 incident were made public following a recent court-martial. The two officers, Lt. Sophie Brook and Lt. Cdr. Nicholas Stone, were serving aboard the Vanguard class ballistic missile submarine HMS Victorious and the Astute class nuclear attack submarine HMS Ambush, respectively. Lt. Brook was a watch leader aboard Victorious at the time...

WASHINGTON — House Judiciary Committee Republicans are demanding that 51 former intelligence operatives divulge information about their 2020 statement that documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation — with a senior GOP aide telling The Post that the ex-spies should expect subpoenas next year if they fail to comply.

CDMedia has confirmed the Hunter Biden infamous ‘laptop from Hell’ contains many U.S. Department of Defense ‘root encryption certificates’, or encryption keys to DoD databases. The keys have unusual long-term expiration dates, with many lasting twenty years or more. This information was discovered during a deep forensic investigation done over the last couple weeks, by Jack Maxey and his team in Switzerland. This situation raises multiple questions, such as… Why did Hunter Biden have a large number of Department of Defense encryption codes to allow access to national security data? Did Hunter Biden give anyone else access to this information?...

THE US has been targeted by a cyber attack in a "possible serious breach", according to sources. Fox News' White House Correspondent Jacquie Heinrich tweeted: "The State Department has been hit by a cyber attack, and notifications of a possible serious breach were made by the Department of Defense Cyber Command. "It is unclear when the breach was discovered, but it is believed to have happened a couple weeks ago. "A source familiar tells Fox the State Department’s ongoing mission to evacuate Americans and allied refugees in Afghanistan “have not been affected”. "The extent of the breach, investigation into the...

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that a counterterrorism analyst has been arrested for leaking classified information to members of the media, including one person with whom he was apparently romantically involved.Law enforcement took Defense Intelligence Agency official Henry Kyle Frese, 30, into custody Tuesday morning when he arrived at work. He has been indicted in federal court in Virginia.Frese, who had top-secret clearance, is accused of leaking classified material regarding a foreign nation’s weapons system to two reporters last year and this year.One of the reporters Frese leaked to was involved in a romantic relationship with him at the time and...

FBI uncovered 340,000 Clinton emails on Weiner's devices, new book claims Sent to Huma Abedin, Weiner's estranged wife, using hillaryclinton.com address They were found during a probe into Weiner's lewd messages to an teen girl DailyMail.com revealed in 2016 that Weiner had an online relationship with her The discovery, according to one agent, was like 'dropping a bomb' in a room But the emails fell through the cracks at the FBI because of the Russia probe James Comey probed Clinton's private email server days before 2016 election ============================================================ Stunned FBI agents who uncovered thousands of Hillary Clinton emails while examining...

Yujing Zhang, the Chinese woman arrested at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's private Florida club, earlier this year, has been found guilty on counts of unlawfully entering a restricted building and making false statements to a federal officer. Prosecutors called nine witnesses in a trial that lasted two days. Zhang chose to represent herself during the trial with assistance from the Federal Public Defender's office and court-appointed translators. Zhang faces up to six years in prison. She will be sentenced in late November.

House Oversight Committee Republicans on Tuesday formally called for an immediate hearing on security breaches at the State Department during Hillary Clinton's leadership, after the department said Monday it had uncovered "multiple security incidents" involving more than a dozen employees. In a letter to Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., ranking committee Republicans Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and Jody Hice said State Department officials conducting the ongoing security review into the matter should testify. "We request a hearing to examine widespread security protocol breaches at the State Department concerning former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s private email server," the Republicans wrote. "The unorthodox...

The Chinese national who bluffed her way past two Secret Service details at President Trump’s Mar-a-Largo resort was carrying a thumb drive loaded with malware and a trove of other spy gear, authorities said Monday. Now the FBI is investigating whether Yujing Zhang, 33, is an agent of the Chinese government. “She lies to everyone she encounters,” Assistant US Attorney Rolando Garcia said during Zhang’s bond hearing Monday. “Her ties are all in China.’’ Zhang was busted at Mar-a-Largo on March 30, after giving conflicting reasons for being there during one of Trump’s routine weekend visits, officials said. The president...

A US Secret Service agent inserted a USB drive infected with "malicious malware" into his laptop after the hardware was confiscated from a Chinese woman who was arrested late last month after attempting to gain entry to President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. Agent Samuel Ivanovich testified in court on Monday that he put the thumb drive into his own computer, and it began installing files in a "very out-of-the-ordinary" way. He quickly stopped his analysis of the drive, the Miami Herald reported.

Secret Service Director Randolph Alles has reportedly been fired by President Trump after a Chinese woman carrying malware and hard drives made her way into Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago. BREAKING: White House says Secret Service Director Randolph Alles to leave post shortly pic.twitter.com/02EAOJZBGu— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) April 8, 2019 More on the breach from CBS Miami:  A Chinese woman accused of illegally entering President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club with a flash drive containing malware, also had numerous electronic devices and thousands in cash stashed in her hotel room. That from federal prosecutors Monday at Yujing Zhang’s detention hearing in...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A user of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company. The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported. “This unfortunate case was the result of a human error and an isolated single case,” an Amazon spokesman said on Thursday. The first customer had initially got no reply...

Marriott International said early Friday that data on roughly 500 million customers staying at Starwood hotel properties had been compromised in a breach that gave unknown attackers access to the Starwood network since 2014. The company said it has not finished identifying duplicate information in the database, but believes it contains information on up to approximately 500 million guests who made a reservation at a Starwood property. The hotel giant said that on September 8, 2018, it received an alert from an internal security tool regarding an attempt to access the Starwood guest reservation database. The company said it “quickly...