Edward Snowden | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Last week, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) ruled the National Security Agency (NSA) to do not keep Internet and phone metadata gathered through bulk surveillance programs longer than five years and destroy them. Judge Reggie Walton said, keeping records for more than 5 years " would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government ," Later, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy and civil liberties group asked the Court to temporarily hold the destroy orders, saying the records may be used as an evidence in its lawsuits challenging the NSA surveillance . U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who is overseeing an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), ruled to stop the destruction of millions of Telephone records collected by the National Security Agency's surveillance program and ruled to safeguard th

Explosive revelations of massive surveillance programs conducted by government agencies by the former contractor Edward Snowden triggered new debate about the security and privacy of each individual who is connected somehow to the Internet and after the Snowden's disclosures they think that by adopting encrypted communications, i.e. SSL enabled websites, over the Internet, they'll be secure. People do care of their privacy and many have already changed some of their online habits, like by using HTTPS instead of HTTP while they are surfing the Internet. However, HTTPS may be secured to run an online store or the eCommerce Web site, but it fails as a privacy tool. The US researchers have found a traffic analysis of ten widely used HTTPS-secured Web sites " exposing personal details, including medical conditions, financial and legal affairs and sexual orientation. " The UC Berkeley researchers Brad Miller, A. D. Joseph and J. D. Tygar and Intel Labs' researchers, Li

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Once again, a new revelation showed the ugly side of the Government who are conducting Global Mass surveillance and previous documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have defaced the US Intelligence Agency NSA , who were taking care of a number of projects like PRISM, XKeyscore, DROPOUTJEEP , and various others to carry out surveillance of millions of people. Now, it has been revealed that the US National Security Agency ( NSA ) helped its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters ( GCHQ ), to allegedly capture and store nude images and others from webcam chats of millions of unsuspecting Yahoo users, The Guardian reported. Documents handed to the Guardian by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the GCHQ's worked with the US intelligence agency NSA on a joint project dubbed as ' Optic Nerve '. The project carried out a bulk surveillance program , under which they nabbed webcam images every five minutes from random Yahoo

Sooner or later it had to Happen! After whistle-blower Edward Snowden unfolded various spying operations that were controlled by the US Intelligence agency, it gave a reason to all other countries to start their own Counter-Surveillance programs. Last year in October, it was revealed that the National Security Agency ( NSA ) was eavesdropping the mobile communications of German Chancellor  Angela Merkel's  and  Gerhard Schroder's   from many years. Snowden documents detailed about a so-called  National Sigint Requirement List , a list of people and Institutions named as primary targets for the U.S. Intelligence Agency; whose telephone communications should be monitored. After Suffering from spying on them, Germany has finally decided to give a ' Roland for their Oliver ' and planning to resume active Counter Espionage Operations against both the US and several Western associate countries. " This step would be an about-face from the decades-long practic

We are quite aware of the leaks that the Whistleblower Edward Snowden carried out against the US National Security Agency (NSA) and after reading every related update, watching every document that he provided to various news websites, you all are left with a question in mind that,  How he could carry out this whole operation without any helping hand? Yes, you are right! The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden allegedly managed to access thousands of the classified documents by stealing one of his coworker's passwords, according to an unclassified NSA memorandum obtained by the NBC News . Three Members, one NSA's civilian employee, an active duty member of the U.S. Military and a contractor were found involved in the actions that may have aided Snowden's operation; from which NSA 's civilian employee has been stripped of his security clearance and has resigned. Other two has been obstructed from accessing National Security Agency (NSA) facilities, th

The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret military research and weapons programs, along with surveillance programs, that is harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. To make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways, but labeled as legal solutions.  Today, on February 11th, we all unite to fight against the Government intrusion on the privacy of innocent people worldwide, under one banner of ' The Day We Fight Back ', along with other 7000 websites by hosting a large banner at the bottom of the websites; reading " Dear Internet, we're standing with 300+ nonprofits worldwide in demanding an end to mass, suspicionless surveillance ", asking people of the world to vote against proposed NSA reforms that the American Civil Liberties Union has labeled " Bad for Privacy ". The Banner, you can see at the bottom of this page, e

National Security Agency (NSA) – the one that had ruled over the privacy of the entire world from countries to individuals, the one with master access to read anyone's data, intruded into large fiber networks, and can target anyone, at any time, at any place; but lapsed somewhere in protecting its own privacy and security of the confidential data. If I am wrong, then from where did Snowden gets hold over roughly 1.7 million NSA's confidential files in sequence? According to the Intelligence officials who has investigated the insider theft by Snowden, noticed that he had accessed all these documents using some ' web crawler ', a freely available automated tool also known as spiders, which used to search, index and backup a website, " scraped data out of our systems " he said. " We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence ," he added. He used the web crawler tool against NSA 's internal network and 'probably

Since 2011, the collective hacking group, Anonymous and LulzSec were targeting both Government and law-enforcement websites of U.S and UK, by their own DDoS attack tactics which they used to communicate and plan on Chat rooms known as IRCs, but British intelligence agency GCHQ used their own weapon against them. According to the recent Edward Snowden document, a division of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is also very well known as the British counterpart of the NSA, had shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a " denial of service " (DDOS) attacks, making the British government the first western government known to have conducted such an attack, NBC news reports . The same DDoS technique the hackers use to take down government, political and industry websites, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), Sony News International and Westbor

After the revelation of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden , we all very well knew the impact of it on the world, but nobody would have estimated that the impact will be so worst. The revelation, not only defaced NSA, but also its counterpart GCHQ , and various other governments which were serving them in the world's spying scandal. Now, after various allegations on NSA , Chaos Computer Club (CCC) , one of the oldest and Europe's largest association of hackers, along with the International League for Human Rights (ILMR), has filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor General's office on Monday. The Chaos Computer club accuses the German government of capitulating to UK, US and other government intelligence agencies and their communications surveillance whims. In a press release they said: " We accuse US, British and German secret agents, their supervisors, the German Minister of the Interior as well as the German Chancellor of illegal and prohibi

It is very clear that when we talk about Intelligence and Surveillance, the first name comes to our mind is the U.S National Security Agency (NSA) and, the second is Gen. Keith Alexander , the Director of NSA..GEEK behind the massive surveillance Programs. Many documents revealed by the former NSA's contractor Edward Snowden exposed the extend level of worldwide spying scandals projected by U.S Government in the supervision of Gen. Keith Alexander. The Obama Administration has confirmed that they are replacing Gen. Keith Alexander and giving the command of NSA in the hand of a military officer, rather than a civilian who is experienced in Cryptography and Electronic Eavesdropping . Michael S. Rogers , presently the U.S Navy's Cyber Security Chief, will be the new Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and head of the US military cyber command. He has been involved in cyberdefense and offense policy issues as head of the Fleet Cyber Command. Neither Ro

Again a top secret revelation from the Snowden's Desk! A new document retrieved by the whistleblower Edward Snowden shows that the Canadian spy agency is tracking airline travelers even days after they left the terminal, just by capturing their device identification from the free Wi-Fi service at a major Canadian airport. CBC News reported that the US Intelligence agency worked with its counterpart Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) in Canada, and slurped information from the free Internet hotspots to track anyone who passed through the airport terminal, and could be tracked throughout the country by cross-referencing it with the intercepted information from Wifi at cafes, libraries and other public places, although it is not clear that they were tracking only the users who logged-in to the WiFi services or not. But It is also possible that one can capture the MAC addresses of all the available devices within the range of a Wi-Fi device (using some special tools

Are you fond of playing games on your Smartphone like Angry Birds or Subway Surfer ?? You should now stop wasting your time, because NSA is utilizing your gaming energy in the best possible way. According to the latest documents leaked by former U.S. Government contractor Edward Snowden , Some of the world's most popular Smartphone applications are telling British (GCHQ) and American intelligence agencies ( NSA ) everything about you. NSA is tapping communication across the Internet of all " leaky " apps ( Unencrypted app, without SSL connection ) to peek into the tremendous amounts of very personal data, including your age, location, sex and even sexual preferences. This is really unacceptable! The Guardian claims that the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of these 'leaky' apps, collecting most sensitive information such as sexual orientation and " even sends specific sexual preferences such a

Privacy is "workings of your mind". We share our personal moments captured in images, credit card details, thoughts that are personal or professional with a person or a certain group at different instances of time and want it to be safe and secure. We use an electronic gadget to share something trusting blindly the service provider company which may have to obey some unveiled laws of that country to which it belong and our data might be at risk. The surveillance programs can force these companies to store the information and share it with the Government and can even sniff all the data passing through the channels i.e. Wire or Air, and hence compromise our privacy. Though surveillance programs were in existence before Snowden's leaks, but after the revelation of NSA's surveillance programs, we need to think twice when it comes to our privacy. 28% of all Internet users, i.e. 415 Million people say that they use some sort of privacy tool for their Internet browsing sessio

After the exposure of various surveillance programs, including PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR, DROPOUTJEEP in recent revelation, NSA has come up as the only ' Government that Actually Listen '. Another day and here comes another revelation - According to the The Guardian , National Security Agency (NSA) has collected almost 200 million text messages per day from across the globe and is using them to extract data including location, contact networks and even credit card details. The two names that come in the limelight are,  DISHFIRE  that collects " pretty much everything it can "and PREFER  that conducted automated analysis of the untargeted communications. The program was designed to collect the text messages automatically from various service providers, to pull the details of financial transactions, roaming charges, delayed flights, missed calls and scheduled alerts, address book contacts, credit cards, bank accounts and visited locations. Now If I am not wrong the word ' Untarge

After the revelations from NSA internal documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the world knows the NSA as the Real Techie Gangster of this 21st Century, with the ability to brutally infiltrate every kind of electronic device, the Internet, and global communications.  " It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. " The Inventor of JavaScript & current CTO of Mozilla, Mr. Brendan Eich said in a blog post NSA is not just focused on high-tech exploits, but also specialize in inserting secret backdoor to legitimate products. Its Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit works with the CIA and FBI to intercept shipments of hardware to insert spyware into the devices. This way NSA is able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives, from computing centers to individual computers, and from laptops to mobi

After the release of NSA Secret spying over Internet communications, I am expecting from all tech companies to make surveillance significantly harder. Yahoo has HTTPS encryption support since late 2012, but users had to opt in to use the feature. Documents revealed by the Edward Snowden shows that the NSA secretly accessed data from several tech giants, including Yahoo, by intercepting unencrypted Internet traffic in a program called Muscular. As promised back in October 2013,  Yahoo  has finally enabled the HTTPS connections by default for their users, that will now automatically encrypts the connections between users and its email service. Jeff Bonforte , senior vice-president of communication products at Yahoo announced  in a blog post: It is 100% encrypted by default and protected with 2,048 bit certificates. This encryption extends to your emails, attachments, contacts, as well as Calendar and Messenger in Mail. HTTPS by default is really a good news for Yahoo users, that will

Now that we have enough details about how the NSA's Surveillance program, running for a long time against almost each country of this planet.  Hundreds of top-secret NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden already exposed that Spying projects like PRISM and MUSCULAR are tapping directly into Google and Yahoo internal networks to access our Emails. NSA's tactics are even capable to defeat the SSL encryption, so unsecured email can easily be monitored and even altered as it travels through the Internet. One major point on which all of us are worrying is about the privacy of communication among each other and If you're looking for a little personal privacy in your communications you will need to encrypt your messages. To avoid privacy breaches; rather I should say to make it more difficult for the NSA or British GCHQ surveillance program to read our communication, we should use PGP encryption (Pretty Good Privacy). Why we should Encrypt ou