Edward Snowden | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ , gained secret access to the German telecom companies' internal networks, including Deutsche Telekom and Netcologne, in an effort to " map the entire Internet — any device, anywhere, all the time. " As reported by German news publication Der Spiegel, citing the new set of leaked documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the five major intelligence agencies including NSA and GCHQ have been collaborating to get near-real-time visualization of the global internet as a part of NSA's ' Treasure Map ' surveillance program , also dubbed as "the Google Earth of the Internet." TREASURE MAP TRACKS YOU 'ANYWHERE AND ALL THE TIME' The data collected by the intelligence agencies doesn't just include information from large traffic channels, such as telecommunications cables. Rather, it also include information from every single device that is connected to the internet somewhere in the w

Yahoo! has broke its silence and explained why it handed over its users' data to United States federal officials, thereby promising to expose those court documents which ordered the snooping. The US government threatened Internet giant with a $250,000 fine per day several years ago if it failed to comply with National Security Agency 's notorious PRISM Surveillance program, according to unclassified court documents released by Yahoo! on Thursday. " The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the US Government's surveillance efforts ," the company's general counsel Ron Bell said on Yahoo's Tumblr page . " At one point, the US Government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply. " The documents released by Yahoo! shed new lights on the NSA's secret surveillance program PRISM, which was previously leaked from the agency's confidential documents provided by Global su

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Have you ever used Shodan search engine? A publicly available service crawls the Internet looking for connected devices and list their open ports, services running, system information etc. Shodan search engine is majorly used by Hackers, developers, students and anyone else with a sense of curiosity to find Internet-facing vulnerable systems with open ports and insecure mechanisms for authentication and authorization i.e. Servers, Internet-Connected Cameras, Traffic Lights, And SCADA Systems. According to latest revelation from the whistleblower Edward Snowden , British spy agency GCHQ – counterpart of NSA – apparently uses their own port scanning service to target internet-connected systems in at least 27 countries, in an attempt to potentially exploit them. In top-secret documents published by Heise on Friday, the Port-scan is a part of the "Hacienda" program which scans for open ports on all public-facing servers to find out vulnerable applications running on the

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 31-year-old global surveillance whistleblower and former U.S. intelligence contractor, who has received a three- year residence permit from Russia, his lawyer announced on Today. " On the first of August he received a three-year residence permit, " lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told RT . He had not asked for political asylum, his lawyer added. The former NSA contractor has not apply for Russian citizenship for now, as he will be able to apply for the Russian citizenship in five years. " A foreign citizen, who got a residence permit, will certainly be able to apply for citizenship, " Kucherena said. " He will be able to travel freely within the country and go abroad. He'll be able to stay abroad for not longer than three months ," Kucherena said. Snowden is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations the NSA. The

The 31-year-old former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has warned that during surveillance, among other things, NSA system administrators also intercepted and routinely passed the photos of people in "sexually compromising" situations among other NSA employees. In a video interview, NSA whistleblower speaks with the Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and reporter Ewen MacAskill in Moscow, which was then published by the Guardian on Thursday. WOOOH!! ATTRACTIVE NUDIE PICS - PASS IT ON TO BILL TOO " You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old. They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records, " he said in the video interview. " During the course of their daily work they stumble upon something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense – for example, an intimate photo of someone o

So far we have heard that using privacy tools by every individual and offering encrypted communication by every company is the only solution to Mass Surveillance conducted by the government and law enforcement authorities. But, Germany says the only solution to guard against surveillance is - Stop using Computers!! Ohh Please!! Is it a joke? No, it does not mean that they are going to completely throw out all of their computer systems, but rather they would use it preposterous. A year ago, when it came to light that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's own personal mobile phone had been spied by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for years, Surveillance has become a big issue for Germany. Such a big that prominent politicians are seriously considering using manual typewriters for sensitive documents instead of computers. The head of the Germany's NSA Inquiry Committee, Patrick Sensburg said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV show on Monday night, th

If anybody says that NSA is watching you, nobody surprises. But, a large scale investigation published by Washington Post indicates that the scope of surveillance carried out by US National Security Agency was massive even than the expectation of you and me. Just because you are an ordinary person doesn't mean that you are safe, as 90 percent of messages intercepted by the NSA were not foreign targets but ordinary users , like you and me, from the United States and abroad. Interestingly, your all those " startingly intimate " data and personal photographs had been left in plain view on NSA databases for someone else, according to a new report in The Washington Post published Sunday detailing a four-month review of about 160,000 intercepted e-mail and text message conversations involving 11,000 online accounts provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden . The National Security Agency has gathered nearly half of the files which contains names, email addresses or other details be

We all are aware of the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance program to track non-Americans. Thanks to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who provided confidential documents about the widely spread surveillance programs conducted by the government intelligence agency such as NSA and GCHQ. A recent story about NSA surveillance broke when a German public broadcaster ARD published that the Agency is using its surveillance program XKeyScore to target users who use encryption and traffic anonymizing software, including Tor Network for anonymous Web browsing and Linux-based Tails operating system in an effort to keep tracks of people outside the US. XKeyScore is a powerful NSA surveillance program that collects and sorts intercepted data, which came to limelight in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last summer, but the greater detail in an investigation conducted by American security expert and Tor Project member Jacob Appelbaum , Aaron Gibsom, and

Just a few hours ago, the Official website of the  Tails Operating System  has been hacked and it appears that a self-proclaimed 17-year old hacker breached and defaced it. Tails is a Linux-based highly secure Operating System, specially designed and optimized to preserve users' anonymity and privacy. Hacker, who named himself " Sum guy ", managed to access the website as administrator and edited the homepage content with the following message: You has been haxoredeszed by sum dumb 17 year old by accident... Sorry about that please forgive me! I accidentally logged myself in as someone important and changed the site, not knowing that what I was changing would save! So sorry about that... I hope you have a backup, Oh and btw I love your OS! Yours sincerely, Sum guy And before I leave, Hi ed... and zoin Defaced Link:  https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html . However, all other pages on the Tails website are working just fine, but at this moment it is not clear

Privacy of Internet users is dead somewhere as the Intelligence agencies can watch our every move, hear our every conversation and read our every email and find out anything related to our personal and private life.  Last year, Edward Snowden revealed about the mass surveillance carried out by NSA and other countries intelligence agencies on every citizen of their country. The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret surveillance programs and to make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways and labelled as legal solutions, harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. The revelations encouraged Internet users think about their privacy and digital rights, and the time came when different organisations started several campaigns to block mass surveillance and fight back against the U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA ). RESET YOU

Two weeks ago, it was revealed that NSA has been reportedly intercepting and accessing routers , servers, and other computer networking hardware to plant data gathering " backdoors " and other spywares before they were exported and delivered to the international customers.  Now, the journalist Glenn Greenwald is set to publish a list of names of those U.S citizens who have been illegally spied on by the NSA. Glenn Greenwald is the journalist from the Guardian newspaper who helped former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden reveal confidential documents about the widely spread surveillance programs conducted by the government intelligence agency such as NSA and GCHQ. Greenwald is promoting his latest forthcoming book, " No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State " that underlines the interest of NSA in conducting massive Internet surveillance program. He said the about to release list will be the biggest revelation out of the

The Edward Snowden revelations triggered a large-scale movement worldwide towards deploying encryption across the Internet for secure services, which is something the government agencies like NSA and GCHQ have targeted repeatedly, as exemplified by abruptly shutting down Lavabit , a Texas-based Encrypted Email Service. In response, a group of young developers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has launched a new email service which offers end-to-end encryption and securing communications that could put an end to government snooping and will keep away our personal data from prying eyes. PROTONMAIL - AN END-to-END ENCRYPTED EMAIL This new encrypted email service, called ProtonMail is a super-secure email service created in collaboration with the scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN. ProtonMail offers a user-friendly experience with full "end-to-end" encryption . It encrypts the data on the browser

The US Intelligence Agency, NSA has been reportedly intercepting and accessing routers, servers, and other computer networking hardware to plant data gathering " backdoors " and other spywares before they are exported and delivered to the international customers, reported by the Guardian. Yesterday in a published excerpt of his forthcoming book, " No Place to Hide ", Journalist Glenn Greenwald underlines the interest of National Security Agency in planting backdoors in U.S. suppliers' routers and other networking devices in order to carry out its massive surveillance program. " A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit ," Greenwald said. " The NSA routinely receives — or intercepts — routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered. " While US government is always prohibiting the purchase of Huawei products due to suspected

Edward Snowden 's leaks last year questioned the integrity of several big and reputed companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft that were found in relation with the NSA in its surveillance programs.  Thereafter they maintained distance with the Agency and claimed to be unaware of such government spying activities. Now, email exchanges between Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt and former NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander , obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that in real do not reveal anything ridiculously outrageous but suggest that the tech companies behind the services you use are very closely in relationship with the NSA and have worked with them over the years. The series of emails obtained by Al Jazeera clearly indicate that the relationship between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) was far cozier than anyone thought. This revelation questions not only the reputation of the largest Internet giant, but also the privac

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced to abandon the controversial  Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic  Random Bit Generator,  better known as  Dual_EC_DRBG in the wake of allegations that the National Security Agency. Back in December, Edward Snowden leaks revealed that RSA received $10 million bribe from NSA under a secret contract to implement their flawed cryptographic algorithm Dual_EC_DRBG in its bSafe Security tool as the default protocol in its products for keeping Encryption Weak . In response to the accusations on NSA and RSA, and despite RSA denied all the accusations. without wasting time NIST issued an announcement recommending against using Dual_EC_DRBG and abandon the cryptographic algorithm from its revised guidance provided in the Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators ( NIST Special Publication 800-90A, Rev.1 ). But it didn't remove it from its random number generator

On Saturday, the Senior Administration Officials cast light on the subject of Internet Security and said President Obama has clearly decided that whenever the U.S. Intelligence agency like NSA discovers major vulnerabilities, in most of the situations the agency should reveal them rather than exploiting for national purpose, according to The New York Times . OBAMA's POLICY WITH LOOPHOLE FOR NSA Yet, there is an exception to the above statement, as Mr. President carved a detailed exception to the policy " Unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need, " which means that the policy creates a loophole for the spying agencies like NSA to sustain their surveillance programs by exploiting security vulnerabilities to create Cyber Weapons. After three-month review of recommendations [ PDF-file ], the Final Report of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies was submitted to Mr. Obama on last December, out of which one of the recommendation on pa

Heartbleed has left a worst impression worldwide affecting millions of websites and is also supposed to put millions of Smartphones and tablets users at a great risk. Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension, which allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, that the server did not intend to reveal. OpenSSL is a widely-used cryptographic library which implements the SSL and TLS protocol and protects communications on the Internet, and mostly every websites use either SSL or TLS, even the Apache web server that powers almost half of the websites over internet utilizes OpenSSL. But to assume that the users using desktop browsers to visit websites are vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, will be wrong. Despite 40