Jeff Stone – Page 17 – WindowsTechs.com

DDoSecrets’ mission is ‘unchanged’ in wake of ‘Blue Leaks’ Twitter ban

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Jeff Stone

After Twitter blacklisted an emerging anti-secrecy group for distributing a vast collection of data stolen from U.S. law enforcement agencies, a co-founder of the WikiLeaks-style startup says it won’t go away quietly. Emma Best, who helps lead Distributed Denial of Secrets, announced on a personal account Tuesday that Twitter had permanently banned the @DDoSecrets account for violating the company’s rules about distributing hacked materials. The move came four days after DDoSecrets published 269 GB of information, including training manuals and guides on containing protesters, initially taken from more than 200 U.S. police agencies. That publication marked the most significant form of hacktivism in recent memory, inserting DDoSecrets into the national news cycle alongside reports about police officers killing unarmed Black Americans. Earlier this month, a Twitter account positing itself as tied to Anonymous claimed to leak data tied to the Minneapolis Police Department. That data turned out to be scraped […]

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DDoSecrets’ mission is ‘unchanged’ in wake of ‘Blue Leaks’ Twitter ban

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Jeff Stone

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New Zealand freezes $90 million connected to accused bitcoin launderer Alexander Vinnik

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Jeff Stone

Authorities in New Zealand have seized the equivalent of $90 million in assets as part of an investigation into a Russian man accused of laundering cybercriminal funds through a global cryptocurrency exchange. The New Zealand Police announced Monday it had taken control of the funds, equivalent to $140 million in New Zealand dollars, belonging to Alexander Vinnik, the alleged operator of BTC-e, a currency trading platform shuttered by the U.S. government in 2017. The exchange effectively functioned as a money laundering operation for internet scammers engaged in computer hacking, ransomware attacks, fraud and illicit drug sales, according to New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Coster. “New Zealand Police has worked closely with the Internal Revenue Service of the United States to address this very serious offending,” Coster said in a statement. “These funds are likely to reflect the profit gained from the victimization of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of […]

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‘Distributed Denial of Secrets’ publishes ‘Blue Leaks,’ a trove of law enforcement records

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Jeff Stone

An anonymous hacktivist group says it’s published a trove of sensitive law enforcement data that originated with hundreds of police departments in an apparent effort to expose police abuses amid ongoing demonstrations through the U.S. The “Distributed Denial of Secrets” group marked Juneteenth, the June 19 holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S., by publishing a searchable database containing 269 GB of data apparently stolen from more than 200 law enforcement agencies. The database, which the group has named “Blue Leaks,” appears to contain police training materials, police safety guidelines and protest containment strategies. The files also may contain names, email addresses, phone numbers and a large number of text and video files, according to a June 20 alert from the National Fusion Center Association obtained by security journalist Brian Krebs. The association reported that the data surfaced following an apparent breach at Netsential, a Houston-based web development […]

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Australia blames a state actor for major disruptions. China is already denying it.

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Jeff Stone

Government agencies and private companies in Australia are experiencing a “sophisticated” cyberattack carried out by a nation-state, according to Prime Minister Scott Morrison. In an announcement Friday, Morrison informed the public that “all levels of government” and a number of critical businesses and essential services are dealing with malicious activity that is accelerating in severity after beginning months ago. Specific details about the incident are scarce, and Morrison has declined to name the government behind the attacks, the motive or the exact nature of the incident. There has not been a major compromise of personal data, he said. “We know it is a sophisticated state-based cyber actor because of the scale and nature of the targeting and the tradecraft used,” he said. “There aren’t too many state-based actors who have those capabilities.” Senior government officials told Australia’s ABC News that China is the main suspect in the attack, adding that […]

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Treasury Department sanctions six Nigerians after email scam nabs millions of dollars

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Jeff Stone

U.S. officials have sanctioned six Nigerian men for their involvement in email fraud schemes resulting in the theft of more than $6 million from American businesses and individuals. The Department of Treasury announced on Tuesday it had taken action against the accused scammers as part of an effort to stifle business email compromise efforts, in which attackers pose as co-workers, family members or romantic partners. In this case, suspects impersonated executives and potential love interests to obtain victims’ bank account information, usernames and passwords, Treasury officials said. More than 19,000 Americans reported being victimized by such crimes in 2019, leading to $1.5 billion in known theft, according to the most recent figures from the FBI. Reported losses have increased every year since the bureau started tracking BEC figures in 2013, officials said. “Cybercriminals prey on vulnerable Americans and small businesses to deceive and defraud them,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said […]

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Sweeping Russian disinformation effort relied on blog posts, social media to target Kremlin rivals

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Jeff Stone

A years-long propaganda effort that relied on thousands of blog articles and internet forgeries to discredit adversaries of Russian President Vladimir Putin is the latest reminder that Kremlin operatives are trying to influence foreign affairs, even if their level of success often is difficult to measure. Since 2014, Russian disinformation specialists have authored roughly 2,500 anonymous blog stories, social media posts and other techniques in an attempt to amplify Kremlin messaging, according to findings published Tuesday by social media analysis firm Graphika. The activity focused on a range of other topics long-favored by Russian propaganda, such as the Ukrainian government, former U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the World Anti-Doping Agency. One facet of the campaign portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an alcoholic. Graphika describes the scheme as Operation Secondary Infektion, borrowing the name from a KGB plot which suggested the U.S. had invented the AIDS virus. While researchers noted […]

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Wyden seeks details on spies’ data protection after scathing CIA audit on Vault 7 leaks

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Jeff Stone

A senator with insight into the way U.S. intelligence agencies conduct espionage wants to know if American spies are protecting their secrets in a way that prevents intruders from stealing information that’s crucial to national security. In a letter sent Tuesday to the director of national intelligence, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked for more information about what he described as “widespread security problems across the intelligence community.” Wyden was referencing, in part, an internal Central Intelligence Agency audit that described “longstanding imbalances and lapses” in data protection before WikiLeaks published secret U.S. hacking tools, known as the Vault 7 files, starting in 2017. The October 2017 audit encouraged the CIA to view the audit’s findings as “a wake-up call” and “an opportunity” to “reorient how we view risk.” Now, Wyden is asking Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe about whether known vulnerabilities still exist. The intelligence community “is still lagging […]

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No, that wasn’t a DDoS attack, just a cellular outage

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Jeff Stone

If Anonymous actually knows about a cyberattack that knocked telecommunications services throughout the U.S. offline Monday, then its members aren’t saying much. A Twitter account claiming to be attached to the once formidable hacking group on Monday stated, without evidence, that the U.S. was enduring a distributed denial-of-service attack, perhaps from China. The tweets, sent by the @YourAnonCentral account to its 6.5 million followers, coincided with outages for T-Mobile customers in multiple cities. Two messages claiming a DDoS attack was underway had received more than 17,000 retweets by press time, while other Anonymous accounts also amplified the allegations without providing any additional insight. Neville Ray, chief technology officer at T-Mobile, said Tuesday that the company had fixed the issues. Security experts quickly pinned the issue on T-Mobile network configuration issues which resulted in the hours of downtime for customers, rather than a malicious DDoS meant to knock services offline by […]

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