The latest coverage of the Department of Homeland Security and cyber threats around the globe.
By Andrew Blake - The Washington Times
Critical industries in the United States and abroad have been targeted recently by a cyber-espionage campaign waged with computer code previously traced to the Chinese military, but security researchers analyzing the latest activity are skeptical of solely blaming the same state-sponsored hacking group as before. Published October 18, 2018
In an otherwise innocuous part of Facebook's expansive Silicon Valley campus, a locked door bears a taped-on sign that reads "War Room." Behind the door lies a nerve center the social network has set up to combat fake accounts and bogus news stories ahead of upcoming elections.
The Army this month outlined its plan for using modern-day information warfare in future military conflicts as part of new, high-technology warfighting capabilities.
The Senate demanded Thursday that Google send written responses to questions regarding the latest security breach by the end of the month.
Publicly available hacking tools were leveraged to conduct an international espionage campaign targeting government victims, security researchers warned Wednesday.
Jackson Cosko, the former Democratic staffer accused of "doxing" Republican senators by leaking their personal information, was ordered held without bond Tuesday, with the judge saying he posed a risk to the community.
Despite the efforts of government watchdogs, news organizations and social media sites, the vast majority of Twitter accounts suspected of spreading disinformation and "fake news" in the 2016 presidential election are still operative with just weeks to go before midterm voting.
Google announced Monday it is shutting down its Google Plus platform after it revealed that user data was compromised.
Russian election officials are headed to the United States to prepare for monitoring next month's midterms, a former member of Moscow's Central Election Commission said Friday.
Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly last week, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani promised that his country would soon hold an international conference on the scourge of hacking and cyberwarfare.
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor responsible for leaking evidence of the U.S. government's vast surveillance abilities, has scrutinized the nationwide "Presidential Alert" test that sent messages to millions of cellphones Wednesday.
Vice President Mike Pence sharply criticized Chinese interference in U.S. politics and increasing military aggression Thursday, leveling up a blistering rhetorical assault at a moment when Washington and Beijing are hardening the battle lines after months tension over tariffs and trade.
Russian intelligence hackers ran a massive four-year disinformation campaign in which they obtained sensitive information from targets that included the world's leading soccer organization, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Democratic Party, the Justice Department said Thursday in a coordinated legal offensive with allied Western governments against Russian cyber operations.
Jackson Cosko, the Democratic staffer accused of "doxing" Republican senators during the Kavanaugh confirmation fight, was caught after he sneaked into a Senate Democrat's office this week and tried to use a computer, police said in an affidavit made public Thursday.
North Korean hackers renown for conducting online bank heists have successfully breached at least 16 victims in 11 countries in the last four years, making millions of dollars for Kim Jong-un's regime in spite of international sanctions, a U.S. cybersecurity firm reported Wednesday.
Rep. Maxine Waters is denying allegations that one of her staffers posted to Wikipedia the phone numbers and addresses of three Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee as they questioned the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
Ransomware has infected computers used by the Port of San Diego, disrupting operations at the southern California shipping hub and attracting the attention of federal authorities.
Facebook announced Friday that nearly 50 million accounts were affected by a "security issue."
The infamous Kremlin-linked hacking group, Fancy Bear, is now using stealth new tools that experts have never seen before, cyber-espionage researchers announced on Thursday.
China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) is stepping up open-source spying on the U.S. military and other foreign militaries that will utilize artificial intelligence means.
Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, will meet privately with Republican lawmakers on Friday in the face of lingering questions involving its operations in the U.S. and abroad.
Former Trump campaign aide Roger Stone may have attempted to contact WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the days leading up to the infamous DNC emails leak, ABC News reported Monday.
Russian diplomats have secretly discussed extracting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and escorting him out of the U.K. and beyond the reach of a potential U.S. extradition request, The Guardian reported Friday.
President Trump on Tuesday got tough on China with tariffs, but a bipartisan group of senators want to get tougher, pushing legislation to crack down on Chinese cellphone giant ZTE.
Cellphone spyware sold by an Israeli security firm is suspected of being used against targets in dozens of countries including the United States, researchers warned Tuesday, raising concerns and questions about topics ranging from eavesdropping to export control.
WikiLeaks has denied publisher Julian Assange sought a visa from Russia, disputing a recently leaked letter written to Moscow's consulate in London shortly after the website first started releasing classified U.S. diplomatic documents.
The Trump administration said it will admit no more than 30,000 refugees next year, the lowest cap in history, making good on a presidential promise and enraging immigrant rights activists, who said the U.S. is shirking its global duty.
FEMA announced on Monday that the nationwide test of a new system that would send presidential alerts directly to residents' phones during national emergencies is delayed until Oct. 5.
Julian Assange had just pulled off one of the biggest scoops in journalistic history, splaying the innards of American diplomacy across the web. But technology firms were cutting ties to his website, WikiLeaks, cable news pundits were calling for his head and a Swedish sex crime case was threatening to put him behind bars.
North Korea on Friday denied the existence of Park Jin Hyok, the accused hacker charged by the Trump administration last week with participating in suspected state-sponsored cyberattacks suffered by victims including Sony Pictures Entertainment.
President Trump moved Wednesday to deter foreign countries or people from meddling in U.S. elections, creating a mechanism to automatically impose sanctions when intelligence agencies detect cyberattacks.
Iraq was the first country to earn its way off President Trump's travel ban last year, after the administration said it wanted to thank the Muslim nation for agreeing to start taking back its deportees whom the U.S. was trying to oust. But evidence has emerged suggesting that either Iraq has backslid or the deal was never what the administration said it was in the first place.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday the FBI has ongoing terrorism investigations in all 50 states.
On the anniversary of 9/11, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray warned that the terrorism threat has expanded with the rise of social media.
British Airways, one of U.K.'s largest airlines, disclosed a data breach Thursday affecting customers who booked travel arrangements through its website and mobile application.
The Trump administration charged a North Korean spy Thursday with the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and said the rogue regime in Pyongyang has been responsible for other attacks on banks, film studios and defense contractors across the globe.
The House of Representatives has passed legislation directing the president to essentially name and shame foreign hackers accused of participating in state-sponsored cyberattacks against the United States government and the nation's most vital computer networks.
Apple intends to launch a dedicated team tasked with training law enforcement officials on digital forensics, according to a report published Wednesday, potentially alleviating challenges faced by inexperienced criminal investigators inundated by data.
Leaders of the Senate intelligence committee on Wednesday blasted search engine giant Google for failing to participate in the leading congressional inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
A majority of Americans have taken steps to limit Facebook's presence in their lives, according to new Pew Research polls released on Wednesday.
Moscow has warned Google against meddling in regional and municipal elections scheduled for Sunday, raising concerns over YouTube videos urging Russians to participate in protests this weekend organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai called for greater transparency from internet "gatekeepers" on Tuesday, a day before Facebook and Twitter representatives face questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor recently sentenced to over five years in prison for leaking classified material to the media, will seek a reprieve from the White House in light of President Trump calling her punishment "so unfair," she said Friday.
Twitter announced Thursday that it's launching a new "issue ad" policy that requires advertisers to be certified but creates an exemption for news organizations.
President Trump received kudos Thursday from Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor recently ordered to spend more than five years in prison for leaking a classified report involving Russian election meddling, after condemning her sentencing last week as "so unfair."
The FBI on Wednesday contradicted President Trump's claim that Chinese hackers compromised Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's personal email server.
A college student from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to hacking the city's mayor and selling his stolen emails.
Hackers associated with the Iranian government have set their sights on universities in the United States and abroad in spite of previously drawing ire from the Trump administration in response to similar cyberattacks, security researchers warned Friday.
A conservative group filed a complaint Thursday with the Senate Ethics Committee, alleging Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson broke the law this month when claiming Russian operatives had penetrated Florida's election apparatus.
In the pages of World Affairs from 2015, I wrote an article that condemned the then-contemporary strategic thinking as being anything but strategic. The American national security establishment's obsession with counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency is going to come back to haunt us since great power conflict never ceases.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Russia's recent cyberattack revealed by Microsoft early Tuesday morning is unsurprising.
Microsoft said Tuesday it has uncovered new Russian hacking attempts targeting U.S. political groups ahead of the midterm elections.
President Trump's former campaign adviser Roger Stone shared an image on social media depicting himself, the president and several people involved or associated with the Trump administration wearing swastika-decorated spacesuits.
Facebook inventor and CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted that his company was able to flag "99 percent of the ISIS and al Qaeda content ... before any human sees it" when he testified before Congress in April. But as the debate about social media's responsibility and the First Amendment rages, Mr. Zuckerberg's comment obscures as much as it reveals, experts said.
With early voting beginning Monday in some Florida counties, the Senate race there was jolted as Republican Gov. Rick Scott kept up the pressure on Sen. Bill Nelson's thus-far unsubstantiated claims that Russian operatives have already compromised Florida elections.
Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to.
The theft of an empty plane by an airline worker who performed dangerous loops before crashing into a remote island in Puget Sound illustrated what aviation experts have long known: One of the biggest potential perils for commercial air travel is airline or airport employees causing mayhem.
The U.S. is bracing for cyberattacks Iran could launch in retaliation for the re-imposition of sanctions this week by President Donald Trump, cybersecurity and intelligence experts say.
Alex Jones of Infowars has been booted from YouTube, Apple, Spotify and Facebook for what the tech giants consider his rampant hate speech. And with that, Jones has become the face of the censorship fight. This seems counterproductive to those who would silence him, yes?
Facebook and YouTube shut down accounts Monday run by radio host Alex Jones, saying his charged rhetoric violated their policies and were detracting from their efforts to spawn a civil conversation. Apple also said it nixed Mr. Jones' podcast from its iTunes subscription lists, and Spotify erased the host's program from its feed, as social media companies began to take a more active role in policing their content.
The use of explosives-laden drones in an assassination attempt against Venezuela's president over the weekend has sent concern soaring among security officials over the growing threat that even consumer-level drones rigged with rudimentary bombs now pose to heads of state around the world.
The U.S. Supreme Court had a lesson Tuesday for the good-hearted folk who would apply feelings instead of the Constitution to the interpretation of the law. By the familiar 5 to 4 vote on constitutional issues, the High Court upheld the clear language of Congress in support of President Trump's order limiting the entry of risky foreign nationals to the United States.
Alexa, how do we get competition? When Democrats rule D.C., you have to hand it to them. They know how to take care of their fellow Democrats. When Republicans rule D.C., they take care of the Democrats, too.
Over the last two weeks, there has been a vigorous debate about internet regulation. Under the plan I recently proposed, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would restore internet freedom by rolling back heavy-handed government regulations imposed during the Obama administration. Some have tried to whip Americans into a frenzy by making outlandish claims. Feeding the hysteria are silly accusations that the plan will "end the internet as we know it" or threaten American democracy itself.
Global terrorism is spreading like a dangerous cancer that knows no borders. It cannot be defeated by the military alone. As the Islamic State's grip on Mosul is faltering today, so must its grip on the young minds of Iraq through instruction in religious freedom and reconciliation.
Russia's intelligence service hacks Democratic Party computer networks and puts out stolen emails in a bid to influence the 2016 election. China says it owns 90 percent of the South China Sea and begins building military bases under a vague historical claim to the strategic waterway. Iranian hackers break into American banks and a water control computer network at an upstate New York dam. Welcome to the new form of conflict in the 21st century: information warfare.
Two of the government's highest ranking intelligence officials will go before a House committee next week to testify about President Trump's bombastic claim that his predecessor "tapped" his phones during the 2016 election.
President Trump and the lower federal courts are playing a dangerous game of ping-pong, and the nation's security is paying for it. The president, who is responsible for the nation's safety, proposes and certain federal judges, who have no such responsibility dispose. The president proposes again, and again a judge or two dispose.
The federal government has purged its computers of Kaspersky Lab products, a Democratic senator revealed Tuesday, but contractors and other third-party providers are still ridding their systems of the Russian company's software and services, the head of the Department of Homeland Security added.
The activities of one of China's cyber spymasters has been revealed for the first time in a government report on Beijing's unfair trade practices made public last week.
President Trump told lawmakers meeting on immigration at the White House Thursday that the U.S. should stop accepting immigrants from "sh--hole countries" like Haiti and El Salvador, according to a report.
The White House said Tuesday that North Korea was directly responsible for a "reckless" ransomware attack in May that struck computers in about 150 countries.
President Trump will announce Monday his new National Security Strategy, putting his own stamp on a defense plan that reverses an Obama administration policy by eliminating climate change from a list of threats to national security.
Construction has concluded on the eight prototypes of President Trump's border wall, the government announced Thursday.
Facebook estimates 10 million Americans saw the advertisements that Russian groups purchased to try to influence the presidential election last year, but analysts said that undersells the reach of the ads, which may have been seen by as many as 70 million.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's spokesman said Thursday that federal investigators' moves to wiretap him in 2014 and again in 2016, around the time he was involved with the campaign, were politically motivated.
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has fired an information technology staffer following his arrest on a bank fraud charge at a Virginia airport where he was attempting to fly to Pakistan.
Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly officially revoked President Obama's 2014 attempt to broaden his previous deportation amnesty for Dreamers, which had been held up by federal courts for more than two years.
Homeland Security added dozens of jurisdictions to its latest name-and-shame list of sanctuary cities, released Wednesday, including Baltimore, where the police commissioner has said officers would not work with federal agents to enforce immigration laws.
Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab in 2012 was among the first Iraqi refugees to enter the U.S. after President Obama lifted a six-month freeze on such entries as his aides tightened a shaky vetting process.
The FBI believed Huma Abedin's laptop computer did have evidence she and her boss, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, mishandled classified information, according to a search warrant released Tuesday that shows the basis agents had for upending the presidential election with their controversial election-season probe.
Included among the more than 1 billion Yahoo accounts compromised by a 2013 security breach disclosed Wednesday were those of at least 150,000 U.S. government and military employees, according to a researcher who first discovered the stolen data being sold online.
Hillary Clinton's top adviser said the FBI is investigating Russia's possible role in hacking thousands of his personal emails, an intrusion he said Donald Trump's campaign may have been aware of in advance.
