Edward Snowden | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The UK Government has quietly changed the Anti-Hacking Laws quietly that exempt GCHQ , police, and other electronic intelligence agencies from criminal prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones and carrying out its controversial surveillance practices. The details of the changes were disclosed at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal , which is currently hearing a challenge to the legality of computer hacking by UK law enforcement and its intelligence agencies. About a year ago, a coalition of Internet service providers teamed up with Privacy International to take a legal action against GCHQ for its unlawful hacking activities. However, the Government amended the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) two months ago to give GCHQ and other intelligence agencies more protection through a little-noticed addition to the Serious Crime Bill. The change was introduced on June 6, just weeks after the complaint was filed by Privacy International that GCHQ had conducted compu

US Court rules NSA Phone surveillance Program is illegal United States' National Security Agency (NSA) Spying program that systematically collects data about Millions of Americans' phone calls in bulk is illegal – Yes illegal. The NSA Phone surveillance program, first disclosed by the former NSA employee and whistleblower of global surveillance Edward Snowden , ruled illegal by a New York federal appeals court on Thursday, ordering lawmakers to either completely end or replace the program. Mass Collection of Metadata: Under this program, the U.S. agency has collected information about phone numbers called and how many times it has been called. However, no content of conversations has been recorded. The program also allegedly spied on European firms and among the individuals targeted was German Chancellor Angela Merkel . However, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York issued a 97-page in-depth court ruling , in which all the three judges said

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

Remember the largest hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment late last year? Well, nobody can forget it. But let me remind you once again: Sony Picture Entertainment hack was one of the most devastating hacks in the history that leaked several hundred gigabytes of sensitive data, including high-quality versions of five unreleased movies , celebrity phone numbers and their travel aliases, private information of its employees, upcoming film scripts, film budgets and many more. Now, these large troves of hacked Sony data have been republished by Wikileaks. THE SONY ARCHIVES WikiLeaks on Thursday released " The Sony Archives ," a fully searchable online database containing more than 30,000 documents and 173,132 emails that, it claims, were stolen from last year's Sony Pictures hack , proving a devastating and embarrassing security failure for the studio. It is like, Whistleblower Julian Assange has hit the nerve: The massive hack has already cost the e

U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is infamous for conducting Global Mass Surveillance to snoop secretly on users' online communications, phone calls, private instant messages, and personal emails, but there is something shocking about it. The Security Agency also asked its employees to watch Porn -- Yes! Porn and a lot of Porn. The Analysts and Terrorism experts employed by U.S. Intelligence Agencies including the NSA and the CIA ( Central Intelligence Agency ) are tasked to watch graphic videos all day long. According to the recent report by Daily Beast , the Graphic video contents containing ISIS prisoner beheading, attacks on U.S. military forces, and sometimes sexual abuse of children are gathered from the computers and smartphones of captured or killed terrorists, and from websites frequented visited by jihadists. WHY NSA IS WATCHING PORN? Islamic State (Isis) and Al-Qaeda terrorists are using Reddit, eBay and pornography to send coded messages to thei

Many times organizations, companies and groups of people come across the problem when their social media teams have to work within a single Twitter account or maintain multiple twitter accounts. In this case, either they need to use some third party API-based services or they use TweetDeck software, the official free alternative tool to manage multiple twitter accounts. But the major problem with TweetDeck service is that everyone in the team need to have access to the same TweetDeck account password or multiple Twitter account passwords in order to use multiple accounts at one interface, and this is a known password sharing security issue from past few years. To cope up with these issues, Twitter has started rolling out a new feature called TweetDeck Teams , a new way to let you share your Twitter accounts on TweetDeck to multiple users without sharing passwords. ROLE OF ADMINISTRATORS TweetDeck Teams, which is rolling out to TweetDeck for the web, TweetDeck for Chro

President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Friday that encourages and promotes sharing of information on cybersecurity threats within the private sector and between the private sector companies and the government agencies as well. AREAS TO IMPROVE During his speech at the White House Cybersecurity Summit at Stanford University in California, where many tech leaders and other government officials also assembled, the President highlighted events affecting cybersecurity and the development of the Internet. The four areas that Obama believes must be improved are listed below: Development and evolution of the Internet Cybersecurity Rights of individuals in regards to the Internet Cooperation between the Government and private companies EVERYONE IS VULNERABLE - OBAMA " The cyber world is sort of the Wild Wild West and to some degree we are asked to be the sheriff ," Mr. President told a crowd at the Memorial Auditorium. " When something lik

The NSA and GCHQ have tracked and monitored the activities of independent and nation-state hackers, along with some of the foremost security researchers in order to gather information on targets and pilfer the stolen data from hackers' archives, top secret Snowden documents reveal. State-sponsored, individual Blackhat hackers and hacking groups target some or other organizations on an ongoing basis. So, by monitoring the work of 'freelance' and rival state hackers, the NSA and its allies get the stolen information, such as email accounts or chats owned by target of their interest, without doing much of hard work. HACKERS STOLE FROM TARGETS & AGENCIES STOLE FROM HACKERS According to the latest revealed documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden , the hacks and sophisticated breaches on the targets were carried out by the state-sponsored and freelance hackers, but the stolen data, referred to as 'take', was then pilfered by the agencies for

A number of western companies are doing big business in China, but now they may have to pay a huge value for to do so. China has introduced strict new banking cyber security regulations on western companies selling technology to Chinese banks. The Chinese government wants backdoors installed in all technologies that imports into the Middle Kingdom for the benefit of Chinese security services. The latest rules also state that western companies must hand over the Encryption Keys and secret source code as well. The requirements are so absurd that it would be impossible for companies like Apple to comply, which could harm American businesses. " The Chinese government has adopted new regulations requiring companies that sell computer equipment to Chinese banks to turn over secret source code, submit to invasive audits and build so-called back doors into hardware and software, according to a copy of the rules obtained by foreign technology companies that do billions of do

​Researchers have uncovered a new evidence that a powerful computer program discovered last year, called " Regin ", is "identical in functionality" to a piece of malware used by the National Security Agency  (NSA) and its Five Eyes allies . REGIN MALWARE "Regin" is a highly advanced, sophisticated piece of malware the researchers believe was developed by nation state to spy on a wide-range of international targets including governments, infrastructure operators and other high-profile individuals since at least 2008. Regin was first discovered in November 2014 by the researchers at antivirus software maker Symantec and was said to be more sophisticated than both Stuxnet and Duqu . The malware alleged to have been used against targets in Algeria, Afghanistan, Belgium, Brazil, Fiji, Germany, Iran, India, Indonesia, Kiribati, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia and Syria, among others. The recent evidence comes from the journalists at Der Spiege

The latest document release by Edward Snowden revealed the industrial-scale cyber-espionage operation of China to learn the secrets of Australia's next front-line fighter aircraft – the US-built F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) . Chinese spies stole " many terabytes of data " about the design of Australia's Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II JSF, according to top secret documents disclosed by former US National Security Agency intelligence contractor Edward Snowden to German magazine Der Spiegel . Chinese spies allegedly stole as much as 50 terabytes of data, including the details of the fighter's radar systems, engine schematics, "aft deck heating contour maps," designs to cool exhaust gases and the method the jet uses to track targets. So far, the F-35 Lightning II JSF is the most expensive defence project in the US history. The fighter aircraft, manufactured by US-based Lockheed Martin, was developed at a cost of around $400 billion (£230 billion). Beijin

Sometimes we wonder that how the National Security Agency ( NSA ) reached such a wide range of its Surveillance operation across the world – which you can measure from several secret documents released by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. This hell parameter of the NSA's operation was not reached by its agents sitting in the NSA headquarter in United States, but by its undercover agents working in foreign companies based in China, Germany, and South Korea to infiltrate and compromise foreign networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept . NSA INTERCEPTING FOREIGN NETWORKS AND DATA CENTRES The latest document from the Snowden's desk talks about a program called " physical subversion ," under which the NSA's undercover operatives were infiltrating foreign networks to acquire sensitive data and access to systems in the global communications industry and possibly even some American firms. The document describes the details regarding vario

Users might have praised the technology companies for efforts to encrypt their latest devices that would prevent law enforcement agencies' hands on users' private data, but the FBI is not at all happy with Apple and Google right now. The Federal Bureau of Investigation director, James Comey , said Thursday he was " very concerned " over Apple and Google using stronger or full encryption in their Smartphones and Tablets that makes it impossible for law enforcement to collar criminals. According to Comey, the Silicon Valley tech giants are "marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law." " There will come a day – well it comes every day in this business – when it will matter a great, great deal to the lives of people of all kinds that we be able to with judicial authorization gain access to a kidnapper's or a terrorist or a criminal's device, " Comey told reporters . " I just want to make sure we

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

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