Items tagged with FBI
The current prosecution of Ross Ulbricht has brought to light the U.S. government’s stance when it comes to hacking into servers outside the country without a warrant. According to a new legal filing for the Ulbricht case, the Justice Department said that such a warrantless search is permissible. This revelation came about as questions...
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There's a fine line between privacy and safety, and the question we face as a nation is how much information should government agencies be allowed to access? Privacy advocates would argue that the U.S. government is stepping way over the line with the level of spying it's capable of, and in the aftermath of that all...
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Lizard Squad has been on a DDoS attack rampage for the past couple of weeks with Sony’s PlayStation Network, Blizzard’s Battle.net, League of Legends, and NCSoft all succumbing to its attacks with Twitch being its latest target. However, it appears that Lizard Squad’s activities may be curtailed if reports are true. The FBI...
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More details have surfaced on how the FBI uses its own custom malware to penetrate the Tor network's anonymizing service -- and while those tools have been deployed in some important investigations, it's sure to raise hackles in the post-Snowden era. Several years ago, the FBI launched a major sting operation against...
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Kim Dotcom, founder of the now-defunct Megaupload website, scored a victory in his battle with U.S. regulators today. A New Zealand judge has barred authorities there from giving the FBI any codes that would could unlock Dotcom’s encrypted hard drives. That’s not likely to please the U.S. officials...
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Last week, the ACLU was scheduled to meet with local police in Sarasota Florida to discuss the use of cell phone interception towers, dubbed stingrays, that are an increasingly common feature of federal and local investigations. A stingray is a fake cell phone tower that law enforcement can configure to temporarily...
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One of the most troubling facts that came out of Edward Snowden's disclosures last year was the degree to which the government has relied on National Security Letters to compel companies to reveal information about their clients without producing a warrant. Many NSLs were accompanied by non-disclosure orders that...
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Bitcoin is a digital currency that has been rather volatile both in regard to its legality and in terms of its value. Up and down it goes, and the value has dropped again to $129 after hitting $140 the previous day in the wake of the shutdown of online marketplace Silk Road by the FBI. Silk Road was a space where illegal drugs and other shady...
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It’s not just criminals (and their direct antagonists in the security industry); the FBI likes to hack, too. According to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI has been using hacking techniques and products to break into Android phones in order to perform surveillance on criminal suspects. Allegedly, the FBI can hack a...
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In the week since word of the NSA's Boundless Informant and Prism programs leaked online, there's been a great deal of concern over to what degree various companies cooperated with the NSA's requests. Some companies, like Google, have pointed to their repeated requests for greater transparency. Twitter, of course, is...
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In the wake of the Washington Post leaks, there's been a great deal of discussion over how, exactly, companies like Google share data with the government. The original report implied that the NSA has direct datacenter access and either grabs the information directly from Google or was copying and analyzing...
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The Internet is an amazing place. But, increasingly, it's a place filled with peril and pitfalls, particularly if you're hosting something of value. International cybercrime has found itself in the spotlight of late, and now Microsoft is making a concerted effort to help curb it. Microsoft has just announced that it is working lockstep with...
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If you ever wondered what would happen if you started hacking the United States at large, here's a clue. A new report has stated that President Obama's administration is mulling "more assertive" action against China in order to put up an offensive attack against "a persistent cyber-espionage campaign it believes Chinese hackers are waging...
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Late last year, the FBI kicked DNSChanger in the teeth when it arrested a sextet of Estonian nationals running a cybercrime enterprise and shut down their servers. DNSChanger is malware that hijacked DNS servers and made users incredibly vulnerable to redirects to fake and malicious websites, malware attacks from...
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When Apple says "there's an app for that," they mean it. Of all the companies and entities in the world, though, most weren't expecting the FBI to come out with an iOS app. The Child ID app has just hit the App Store, detailed as the first mobile application created by the FBI to provide a convenient place to...
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It's an acknowledged fact that modern technology, Google and the rise of social networking sites like Facebook have changed the rules when it comes to expectations of privacy. Most of the time, when we hear that these evolving expectations have tripped someone up, it's because an employee once considered a shoo-in for a job was disqualified...
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FBI Director Robert Mueller, while speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Wednesday, gave an example of why everyone should be wary of cybercrime. He related the story of the head of one of America's domestic agencies. This person, Mueller said, received an email, purportedly from his bank, which looked...
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No wonder the Pentagon is bracing for all manners of cyber warfare. Late last week, officials reported that the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service saw some of their computers "shut down" after a virus attack overwhelmed them. Reportedly, the virus stemmed from an invasion at the Marshals Service, with an FBI spokesperson noting that it was...
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It doesn't carry quite the same weight as the Warren Commission report and it might even contain more redactions than the Nixon tape transcripts, but recently-released FBI documents obtained by Wired News via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) prove that the FBI has been using its own version of spyware for years to catch cyber-criminals....
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Though you might not go there as often yet, you soon will. It's a random sort of babble that sounds mysteriously entertaining at first and then sucks you in like some cheesy sit-com. What am I speaking of you say? Why the HH Blog Roll of course! In our recent submissions we discuss things like the new HH Twitter and Facebook...
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Just when you thought it was safe to open your browser: "The Department of Justice and FBI today said ongoing investigations have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim...
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