For six months, starting in the fall of 2014, I investigated a shadowy online Russian propaganda operation called the Internet Research Agency. The agency has been widely reported in Russian media to be the brainchild of Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin. At the time, it employed hundreds of Russians in a…
Category: Cyber News
Deconstructing Terrorism: World-Check Terrorism Database Exposed
A financial crime database used by banks has been “leaked” on to the net. World-Check Risk Screening contains details about people and organisations suspected of being involved in terrorism, organised crime and money laundering, among other offences. Access is supposed to be restricted under European privacy laws. The database’s creator, Thomson Reuters, has confirmed an…
Espionage Files: South Korean Intelligence Warns Of ISIS Threat To U.S. Bases
Link this article with a recent article from John Schindler at XX Committee stating that ISIS’ Cyber Arm is indeed Russian Intelligence and you have quite a different story.-SF South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement release on June 19 that ISIS, through its hacking network called United Cyber Caliphate, has collected…
Modern Crime: Will Cyber-Assassinations Soon Be A Reality?
As we hurtle forward into the digital, connected future, ever more objects are becoming targets for hackers and malicious software. Where once hacks only affected computers, they now bring down everything from cars to power grids and thermostats to secretive nuclear enrichment programs. So how long until a hack doesn’t just cause a nuisance or…
Modern Crime: Inside a Russian Hacker Ring
A man with intense eyes crouches over a laptop in a darkened room, his face and hands hidden by a black ski mask and gloves. The scene is lit only by the computer screen’s eerie glow. Exaggerated portraits of malicious hackers just like this keep popping up in movies and TV, despite the best efforts…
Technology: Sci-Fi Classics That Accurately Predicted the Future
With all this talk lately of “Minority Report” type technology in Bio-Metrics and other Security apparatus, I thought it would be interesting to look at other sci-fi movies that nailed it as far as actual current or “coming soon” technology. -SF Did you know a kid’s cartoon predicted 3D-printed food in 1962? Or that…
Surveillance State: Smart Policing
Power Loves the Dark Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds’ Complicity By Matthew Harwood and Jay Stanley Can’t you see the writing on the touchscreen? A techno-utopia is upon us. We’ve gone from smartphones at the turn of the twenty-first century to smart fridges and smart cars. The revolutionary changes to…
Cyber-Security Threat Update: Don’t Get Juice-Jacked
You are racing through the airport. The low power light is blinking red. You are desperate to plug into any outlet you can find. Watch out. You could get juice jacked. Guess what? In every smart phone—no matter what the model—power and data flow through the same USB port and power cable. That creates a potential attack…
Surveillance State: Everything We Know About How the FBI Hacks People
RECENT HEADLINES WARN that the government now has greater authority to hack your computers, in and outside the US. Changes to federal criminal court procedures known as Rule 41 are to blame; they vastly expand how and whom the FBI can legally hack. But just like the NSA’s hacking operations, FBI hacking isn’t new. In…
Book Review: Playing to the Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror
by Michael V. Hayden Penguin, 448 pp When Michael Hayden was a young air force officer in the 1980s, the military stationed him as an intelligence attaché in Bulgaria. There, the man who would rise to the top of the American intelligence community in the post–September 11 era lived under constant surveillance: he and his…