Items tagged with NSA
End-to-end encryption on messaging apps can offer a degree of protection, that is, if you don't let down your guard. That's the essence of the NSA’s latest security warning to iPhone and Android users on the need to manage key settings that might expose them to attacks if not handled properly.
While the warning...
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A 32-old Colorado man who previously worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) has been sentenced to 262 months—close to 22 years—in prison for selling National Defense Information (NDI) to a spy from the Russian Federation. Except that the "Russian spy" was actually an undercover FBI agent.
Jareh Sebastian...
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Chinese threat actors are upping their game in the cybersecurity realm, as indicated by new Linux backdoors and other advanced tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). With this, an international multi-agency team led by the National Security Agency (NSA) has discovered a People’s Republic of China-linked group...
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In 2022, the National Security Agency, in conjunction with the U.K’s National Cyber Security Centre, reported a critical vulnerability in the Windows CryptoAPI to Microsoft. While this was patched in August of 2022 and published in October of 2022, it could still prove to be a problem as threat actors could still...
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Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned mass surveillance whistleblower, officially became a Russian citizen in September of this year when Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting citizenship to Snowden and seventy-four other foreigners residing in the country. Last week, Snowden’s lawyer...
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Edward Snowden has gained Russian citizenship nine years after fleeing the United States and landing in Russia. On Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting citizenship to 75 foreigners residing in the country, with Snowden among them.
Snowden, a former NSA contractor, publicly exposed the...
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Earlier this week, we covered leaked details regarding a government contractor that demonstrated its ability to track billions of phones all over the world by spying on CIA and NSA agents’ activity. Government contractors are able to provide surveillance services by purchasing user data from third parties. However, US...
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There are a number of underground online marketplaces where stolen user data is illegally bought and sold by cybercriminals. Government authorities recently seized and shutdown RaidForums, one of the most notable hubs for such illicit transactions. Meanwhile, there is an entire aboveground industry that specializes in...
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Amazon has secured a lucrative contract dubbed 'WildandStormy' to supply its Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the United States National Security Agency (NSA), in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion when all is said and done. However, it might be premature for Amazon to celebrate the contract win—it's under...
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Approximately two weeks ago, the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, under the National Security Agency (NSA), executed a coordinated attack on the Trickbot botnet. This attack included sending disconnect commands to computers infected with the Trickbot malware, and spoofing records, so the collection of target data has...
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In 2013, Edward Snowden released information on the U.S. Government regarding the mass surveillance and aggregation of data in America. Now, a U.S. Appellate Court has deemed the mass surveillance unconstitutional and thus illegal.
As Reuters reported, “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the...
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The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and National Security Administration (NSA) have joined forces to warn about a new threat of cyberattacks sourced from Russia. The two intelligence agencies have posted a complete technical analysis of what is be called Drovorub malware, which is targeting Linux-based...
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At this point in time it is no secret that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is able to access citizen’s phone calls and text messages. But has the NSA’s various surveillance programs yielded any results? It was recently revealed that the USA Freedom Act of 2015 has cost taxpayers over $100 million USD...
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Field of Dreams taught us, "If you build it, he will come," referring to a deceased baseball legend wandering out of a corn field in Iowa. When it comes to PC security, though, if you discover it ("it" being a vulnerability), the proof of concepts will come, and that is precisely what has happened with a "CurveBall"...
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The National Security Agency (NSA) has a program in place called Upstream that taps directly into the Internet backbone to search traffic. The agency has claimed in the past that the warrantless searches of email are allowed under Section 702 enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Act. The agency made changes in 2017...
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When we think of the National Security Agency (NSA) and cybersecurity, we think of the intelligence agency’s grab bag of security exploits that it uses to enhance its own spying efforts. But one particular remote code execution exploit, which has been dubbed BlueKeep, has the NSA actually warning Windows users to...
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Back in 2017, the National Security Agency (NSA) lost control of one of its hacking tools called EternalBlue. Since the hacking tool slipped into the world, it has been picked up by hackers in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other places. The tool has been used to allegedly create billions of dollars in damage...
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In somewhat of a surprise, the National Security Agency announced the release of Ghidra, a free and open source software reverse engineering toolkit, at the RSA security convention. Ghidra is what the NSA has been using for years, though it is not clear if the public release is the exact same version that it uses...
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Let's start with the good news. Cryptocurrency mining on GPUs has waned considerably, and the shortage of graphics cards that made it nearly impossible to score a mid-range or high-end GPU at or near MSRP is over (for the most part). Are you ready for the bad news? Be that as it may, cryptocurrency mining hacks are on...
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US Intelligence officials have determined that phones and services provided by Huawei, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer in China, and Chinese telecom ZTE pose a security risk to Americans, and that consumers should avoid both companies altogether. The determination was made known by half a dozen US intelligence...
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A team of researchers from Positive Technologies have dug into the innards of Intel Management Engine (ME) 11 and have found a way to turn the feature off. If you aren't familiar with ME, it's a separate processor that is tucked away inside Intel CPUs that allows companies to manage the computers on their networks...
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WikiLeaks, the non-profit organization that publishes secret information provided by anonymous sources, released details about a tool that was used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ensure that other government intelligence agencies were sharing the biometric information they collected. That...
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