Iran Suspected in Worldwide Cyberattacks

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‘Unprecedented’ cyberattacks targeting Western governments and organizations have been traced to hackers in the Islamic Republic.

FireEye, a California cybersecurity and intelligence firm, released a report on January 9 linking Iran to a pattern of cyberattacks dating back to 2017. These attacks targeted nations in North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The report states, “This campaign has targeted victims across the globe on an almost unprecedented scale, with a high degree of success.”

America’s most senior intelligence official has his phone, email hacked

 

A member of a hacker group that took responsibility for breaking into the personal email account of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency last year has now hacked the email of the most senior intelligence official in the United States. In October 2015, the hacker group referred to by its members as “Crackas With Attitude” —CWA for short— claimed it was behind the hacking of an AOL personal email account belonging to John Brennan, who heads the CIA. Less than a month later, the CWA assumed responsibility for breaking into an online portal used by US law enforcement to read arrest records and share sensitive information about crimes involving shootings. Shortly after the second CWA hack, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an alert to all government employees advising them to change their passwords and be cautious about suspicious emails and other phishing attempts.

China exploits terror threat in West to gain access to foreign tech firms

China passed a new anti-terrorism law on Dec. 27 that critics say exploits fears of terrorism in order to extract sensitive information from technology companies.

Tech firms strenuously objected to the law that was unanimously passed by Beijing’s rubber-stamp parliament. The new law states that telecom operators and Internet service providers must “provide technical support and assistance, including decryption” to Chinese authorities in their investigations into terrorist activities.

The Next Wave of Cyberattacks Won’t Steal Data — They’ll Change It

The big attacks that have been disclosed so far in 2015 involved the theft of data, and a lot of it. Some 21 million personnel records were taken from the Office of Personnel Management, likely by China, while 4,000 records, some with “sensitive” information, were stolen from the Joint Chiefs civilian email system, a theft blamed on Russia.

But America’s top spies say the attacks that worry them don’t involve the theft of data, but the direct manipulation of it, changing perceptions of what is real and what is not.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spelled out his concerns in written testimony presented to the House Subcommittee on Intelligence today.

Hillary Clinton emails contained signal intelligence from spy satellites

Nobody is this incompetent. It’s at the point to where it’s intentional. Also recall who sold the Chinese high-tech supercomputers through the U.S. Department of Commerce, allowing them to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenal, which now, among a host of other deterrents can pose a serious challenge to American supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and later the Western Pacific as they continue project power while the U.S. chooses to suicidally decline.

 

Revelation undercuts former secretary of state’s claim she had no idea information was classified

The revelation that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private emails contained sensitive information derived from spy satellites and signal intelligence undercuts her defense that she had no reason to believe she was dealing with classified information, security experts say.

“If she is so ignorant that she doesn’t recognize that this type of information in the email as being classified, it just calls into question her overall competence,” Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst trained in the rules of handling government secrets, told The Washington Times.

OPM Announces More Than 21 Million Affected by Second Data Breach

The federal personnel agency announced Thursday a massive hack.

More than 21 million Social Security numbers were compromised in a breach that affected a database of sensitive information on federal employees held by the Office of Personnel Management, the agency announced Thursday.

That number is in addition to the 4.2 million social security numbers that were compromised in another data breach at OPM that was made public in June.

Of the 21.5 million records that were stolen, 19.7 million belonged to individuals who had undergone background investigation, OPM said. The remaining 1.8 million records belonged to other individuals, mostly applicants’ families.

Former US government employee tried to steal nuclear weapons secrets

The US Justice Department has charged a former government employee for allegedly  trying to steal nuclear secrets through email attacks and sell them to China.

According to an indictment , Charles Eccleston allegedly attempted the “spear-phishing” attack in January targeting dozens of email accounts,  which he believed  would unleash a virus to collect sensitive information on nuclear weapons.

Eccleston, a former employee at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has lived in the Philippines since 2011 after being fired in 2010.

NOAA Employee Charged With Computer Breach Met Senior Chinese Official in Beijing

This is a new development in what was previously posted, showing the level of access and its official state support.

 

A federal weather service employee charged with stealing sensitive infrastructure data from an Army Corps of Engineers database met a Chinese government official in Beijing, according to court documents that reveal the case to be part of an FBI probe of Chinese economic espionage.

Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, an employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) office in Ohio, was arrested in October and charged in a federal grand jury indictment with illegally accessing the Army’s National Inventory of Dams (NID).

The NID is a sensitive database containing information on all U.S. dams. U.S. intelligence officials have said the database was compromised by Chinese hackers in 2013 as part of covert efforts by Beijing to gather sensitive information on critical U.S. infrastructure for possible use in a future conflict.

Chinese Woman Arrested for Downloading Files on Vulnerabilities in US Dams

It’s not hard to imagine, after obtaining information such as this, seeing key dams failing. How would this happen? Not necessarily with terrorist bombings, but with cyberwarfare. If you wanted to physically take them down via power grids, as a professional hit team had done in California, you need only to take out nine substations to indefinitely cripple America and potentially kill hundreds of millions from the aftereffect. It’s already on the edge of failure now as we speak. On the cyberwarfare front, you only need to take advantage of the SCADA system (See also HERE and HERE) that remains largely unprotected and vulnerable as well.

America is in the final phase of a perfect storm overseeing its collapse (on the economic and social front as well) that could happen at any given time as it is now past the point of no return in protecting itself. It can’t even screen itself from espionage in its vital infrastructure, as seen in this article. Having said that, it’s not hard to see that America’s adversaries have first strike capability, and therefore likely checkmate.

But hey, no time for that, we have a MLB World Series to watch and cheap (sometimes toxic) Chinese goods to scuffle over on Black Friday.

 

A sensitive database that lists vulnerabilities in every major U.S. dam was breached last year in an attack traced back to the Chinese regime. The security breach had U.S. officials worried that China could be planning to attack America’s power grid.

Now, one year later, a Chinese woman was arrested for breaching that same network. Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, 59, was arrested on Oct. 20 for allegedly downloading the sensitive files on U.S. dams and for lying to federal investigators.

The registry Chen allegedly accessed and downloaded ranks the dams by the number of Americans who would die if they failed, according to Nextgov. It also lists vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the dams, which could be used by a hostile nation to attack the United States.

Europe’s top court: people have right to be forgotten on Internet

May 13 (Reuters) – People can ask Google to delete sensitive information from its Internet search results, Europe’s top court said on Tuesday.

The case underlines the battle between advocates of free expression and supporters of privacy rights, who say people should have the “right to be forgotten” meaning that they should be able to remove their digital traces from the Internet.

Los Angeles creates ‘Cyber Intrusion Command Center’

LOS ANGELES, Oct 30 (Reuters) – Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, citing warnings by President Barack Obama and National Intelligence Director James Clapper about the threat of attacks on computer networks, on Wednesday announced the creation of the city’s first “Cyber Intrusion Command Center.”

The command center, which will be operated with the assistance of the FBI and Secret Service, will be staffed by cyber security experts who will scan the city’s computer networks for threats and quickly respond to breaches, according to the mayor’s office.