Cybersecurity - Page 8

Hard on the heels of reports that China and Russia are busy using stolen U.S. government data to identify American intelligence officers and assets, comes word that the Obama administration is considering retaliatory sanctions against Russian and Chinese targets.

The White House may activate targeted sanctions against companies and individuals in China as part of a comprehensive response against Beijing’s cyber attacks on U.S. industry.

More details are emerging about Junaid Hussain, the twenty-something British expatriate who served as a key player in the Islamic State’s online army until a U.S. drone strike took him out this week. According to an article at the Wall Street Journal, Hussain was involved in most of ISIS’s hacking and social media exploits.

China’s government announced earlier this week that it had arrested 15,000 people for an assortment of cybercrimes, the result of a project announced in July titled “Cleaning the Internet.”

Once again, the Internal Revenue Service is reporting that a data breach has landed the personal information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers in the hands of hackers. This time, the tax agency is admitting that the info of some 220,000 taxpayers was lost.

Carly Fiorina, a Republican candidate for President and former Chief Executive of Hewlett Packard, showed superior prowess on national security issues when compared to her competitors on the debate stage during Thursday’s “happy hour” debate on Fox News.

United Airlines has announced a penetration of its computer security in May and June, with investigators saying it was most likely the same Chinese squad that carried out the “cyber Pearl Harbor” attack on the Office of Personnel Management, along with an operation against health insurance company Anthem. It appears the Chinese raiders made off with a sizable amount of flight information, including passenger lists, from United.

Hackers from the amorphous cyber-crime collective Anonymous claim to have leaked the data from 4,200 United States Census Bureau files.

Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before the Senate on Thursday to defend his administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. As expected, he took a great deal of heat from irate Republicans, plus a few skeptical Democrats, notably Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey. The headline-grabbing moment came when Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said John Kerry had been “fleeced” by the Iranians.

Middle- and high-school-age students, as well as some teachers, are learning hacking techniques, courtesy of a new cybersecurity summer camp program supported by the National Security Agency (NSA), The New York Times (NYT) reports.

A report on the breach of OPM’s computers systems by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) says hackers did not have to work very hard to gain entry. The report also raises a worrisome new possibility about what hackers might have been doing during the months they had undetected access: adding false data to the systems even as they were stealing from it.

AshleyMadison is a website catering to married people who wish to have an affair. They claim to have 37 million users, and now all of their personal data is in the hands of a hacker group called The Impact Team, which is threatening to expose all those users unless AshleyMadison and a sister site called EstablishedMen are taken down.

It is not surprising that hackers broke into the UCLA’s health system to try to gain access to some of the 4.5 million patients’ records, given the sheer scale of personal health data that has been compromised. But what is shocking is that those records were never protected with a basic encryption, and lost laptops were not required to be reported. Although UCLA said there was no evidence at this time that any patient files were taken, the investigation is ongoing.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has revealed that hackers stole personal information on 25.7 million Americans. That information included Social Security numbers, financial histories, mental health records, and in over a million cases, fingerprints.

Hillary Clinton’s ludicrous effort to reinvent herself as a champion of cybersecurity led her to accuse China of trying to hack “everything that doesn’t move in America” at a New Hampshire campaign event.

FireEye, a private sector cybersecurity firm, told media that they believe they have discovered who was behind the massive hack on the federal Office of Personnel Management in which millions of federal employees’s data was stolen.

The Boston Globe reports an astounding admission from Hillary Clinton during an interview with WMUR radio in Boston: the former Secretary of State was well aware that her department was under constant cyberattack, but she broke the rules, and possibly laws, to build a dangerously insecure email server for herself and top aides anyway.

Marketing company Turn Inc. of Redwood City has been sued in what looks to be a huge mass tort lawsuit alleging a conspiracy with telecommunications giant Verizon Wireless to engage in undisclosed tracking and storing of Internet browsing histories.

New technology was unveiled at the Paris Air Show this year, with a proposal that robots could replace human immigration officials at airports.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has revised its timeline on a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of 4 million Americans to foreign hackers.

Websites run by the Canadian government were attacked on Wednesday, causing widespread service interruptions. The “Anonymous” hacker collective claimed responsibility for the attack, describing it as a protest against the recent passage of a controversial anti-terrorism bill, which the hackers denounced as “a clear violation of the universal declaration of human rights.”

In 2014, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) urged the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to shut down computer systems which were operating without a current security authorization. OIG specifically warned the breach of some of the systems could have “national security implications.”

The United States is committed to a more comprehensive strategy to maintain vigilance in the face of continuing cyber threats to the nation, President Barack Obama said this week, vowing to ramp up the U.S. cyber defense apparatus.

GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina reacted to the cyber-security hack Friday by saying, “Our Federal government is increasingly inept.”

The French government has released some stunning figures to illustrate the intensity of ISIS recruiting efforts in their country. There are at least 2,600 websites in French, run by the terror state and its supporters, and they generate over 40,000 Twitter messages per day, reaching some 2.8 million followers.

German officials confirmed that hackers have managed to obtain access to the internal server of the German Bundestag, the national legislature. The breach occurred two weeks ago. Details remain unclear about what data the hackers took and how sensitive the data is.

In a speech in South Korea, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the Internet needs heavier regulations to “be able to flourish and work properly.”

Millions of TurboTax users will be troubled by a lawsuit that was filed Monday in San Francisco against Intuit, Inc. claiming that when the firm knew TurboTax’s lax software security protections were allowing a huge spike in tax refund theft, TurboTax failed to correct weaknesses or notify customers about ongoing risks.

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) touted the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 in Saturday’s GOP Weekly Address. Transcript (via ABC News Radio) as Follows: Hello, I’m Senator Richard Burr from the great state of North Carolina and I’m honored to chair

The Australian government accidentally released the personal information of President Obama and some 30 other world leaders that were on file from the Group of 20 Summit held last winter in Brisbane.

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal isn’t going away just because she has held a news conference. More questions are coming up every day.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) emphasized the importance of passing information-sharing legislation designed to enhance cybersecurity during the GOP Weekly Address on Saturday. Transcript (via ABC News Radio) as Follows: “Hi, I’m Senator Ron Johnson, from the great state of Wisconsin.

The White House website suffered security breaches this weekend at the same time President Obama was addressing a Stanford University cybersecurity summit, an unfortunately ill-timed incident for an administration many see as languishing in the fight to protect the nation’s cyber institutions.

In a push to improve cybersecurity Barack Obama plans to visit the Bay Area next week to hold a Cybersecurity Summit at Stanford University on Friday.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer argued the US should “go Biblical” if China is behind the recent hacking of health insurer Anthem on Thursday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel. “If it is the Chinese [who are behind the hacking], as

One of the largest data breaches in history was revealed Wednesday, as health insurance giant Anthem Inc. acknowledged its computer system was violated starting on December 10. The company noticed the breach on January 27 and verified it two days later.