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UK's Secretive Spy Agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has open-sourced one of its tools on code-sharing website GitHub for free... A graph database called ' Gaffer .' Gaffer , written in Java, is a kind of database that makes it "easy to store large-scale graphs in which the nodes and edges have statistics such as counts, histograms and sketches." Github is a popular coding website that allows software developers to build their project on a single platform equipped with all the requirements that are gone in the making of a software. Gaffer and its Functionalities In short, Gaffer is a framework for creating mass-scale databases, to store and represent data, and is said to be useful for tasks including: Allow the creation of graphs with summarised properties within Accumulo with a very less amount of coding. Allow flexibility of stats that describe the entities and edges. Allow easy addition of nodes and edges. Allo

Rejoice! From this morning, you can call freely to anyone, talk anything without any fear of being spied by the United States National Security Agency (NSA), as the agency is not allowed to collect bulk phone records . Until now we all are aware of the NSA's bulk phone surveillance program – thanks to former NSA employee Edward Snowden , who leaked the very first top secret documents of the agency in 2013. However, more than two years later of the first revelation, that bulk phone surveillance program has finally come to an end. End of Bulk Phone Surveillance Program The White House announced Friday evening on the intelligence community's official Tumblr that the NSA will officially be shutting down its bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday, November 29. Under this program, the US intelligence agency collected only the " metadata " that reveals data related to the called phone numbers (i.e. which numbers are calling and what time they

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

With 129 people killed in Paris terror attacks and dozens critically wounded, the law enforcement and intelligence officials are reviving their efforts to force companies to put some backdoors in encryption so that they can access your information. How did the Intelligence agencies fail to Intercept terrorist plans of these attacks? In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, Former CIA Director Michael Morell argued on TV that encrypted communication services may have aided the planning and plotting of the Paris attacks, blaming Edward Snowden and US companies for the attacks. Also Read:  NO, We Can't Blame Edward Snowden and Encryption for Terror Attacks With more Surveillance and Encryption backdoor, Is it possible that Friday's attacks could have been stopped before they began? Morell suggested that recalcitrant US companies should be forced to install government backdoors in their software and hand over encryption keys to the government, thinking that Encryption Backd

The German authorities have initiated a further investigation into espionage by the United States secret service NSA and British intelligence agency GCHQ after...   ...the head of the German Federal Chancellery unit had his private laptop infected. According to a recent report published by Der Spiegel , the laptop of the Chancellery division leader was infected with Regin – a highly advanced espionage malware program that has been linked to the National Security Agency (NSA) and its UK counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). As The Hacker News reported almost a year ago, Regin is one of the most highly advanced, sophisticated malware programs that was used to spy on a wide range of international targets including: Internet service providers (ISPs) Telecommunications backbone operators Energy firms Airlines Government entities Research institutes Other high-profile individuals …around the world since at least 2008. Regin has d

Yes, it seems like the mystery has been solved. We are aware of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) powers to break almost unbreakable encryption used on the Internet and intercept nearly Trillions of Internet connections – thanks to the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. However, what we are not aware of is exactly how did the NSA apparently intercept VPN connections, and decrypt SSH and HTTPS, allowing the agency to read hundreds of Millions of personal, private emails from persons around the globe. Also Read:  Top Best Password Managers . Now, computer scientists Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger have presented a paper at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security that advances the most plausible theory as to how the NSA broke some of the most widespread encryption used on the Internet. According to the paper, the NSA has exploited common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm – a common

From today, every phone call you make, every text message you send and every email you write will compulsorily be tracked by the government agencies under a new metadata retention scheme. Yes, you heard right. If you are a citizen of Australia with a mobile phone and an Internet connection, your digital activity will be recorded. As the government's new data retention law comes into effect, the Australian telecommunications companies will now keep large amounts of your telecommunications metadata for two years. The law has allegedly been implemented to protect the country against organized terrorist and criminals, like every government agencies including the United States' intelligence agency NSA and British intelligence agency GCHQ claim. But… This new scheme vastly expands the retention of personal data, which has triggered a debate among Australians as it is a major invasion of privacy . WHAT IS BEING COLLECTED? Until today, data retention by

After the revelations that Whistleblower Edward Snowden made about the United States National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. citizens are in need of more transparent digital security. The Citizens of the United States have appealed to the Obama Administration through a campaign for rejecting any policy, mandate or law that stands against their security in the cyberspace and adopt strong encryption for them. The Washington Post reported that the Obama Administration has agreed partially on the encrypted communications issue. "The administration has decided not to seek a legislative remedy now, but it makes sense to continue the conversations with industry," James B. Comey , FBI Director, said at a Senate hearing Thursday of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. This decision is considered as the Status Quo. It is like a win-win situation to decrease the tension because of the Petition and regard the law enforcement agencies as well a

Shocking! Adblock Extension that blocks annoying online advertising has been sold... ...And more shocking, the most popular " Adblock Extension ", with more than 40 million users, quietly sold their creation to an unknown buyer ... ' Michael Gundlach ', the creator widely used Adblock Extension refuses to disclose the name, who purchased his company and how much it was sold for, just because buyer wishes to remain anonymous. After watching a popup message (as shown) on their browsers this week, the Adblock users are literally going crazy. " I am selling my company, and the buyer is turning on Acceptable Ads, " Gundlach said. Holy Sh*t! NSA Buys Adblock? The ' Anonymous buyer ' conspiracy has caused concern for Adblock users and they have raised number of questions on social media sites, such as: Should I trust AdBlock Extension anymore? Who owns the Software I have installed? Is it NSA? Also, reportedly, Michael Gun

Whistleblower Edward Snowden just joined Twitter, and his first tweet seems to be directed at the US National Security Agency (NSA) . Yes, the world's most popular whistleblower and data privacy advocate has finally joined Twitter just two hours ago, and his first tweet came, " Can you hear me now? " Snowden has gained more than 260,000 followers in just less than two hours, but he is currently following only one account: @NSAGov , the official Twitter account for the National Security Agency. Twitter has verified Snowden's Twitter account ( @Snowden ), and his Twitter bio provides a short summary of his prolonged situation. Snowden's Twitter bio reads, "I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public. Director at @FreedomofPress." Snowden is listed as director of Freedom of the Press, a foundation dedicated to ensuring transparency in journalism in adverse situations. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden sought asylum in

Fed up with the NSA-Snowden updates ? Wait a second...there's some more! Back in May 2013, when former NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked classified documents from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), we doubted the relationship between NSA and telecommunications giant AT&T. But, now their relationship has been revealed – NSA and AT&T are Best Friends . Yes, that's right, as recent revelations say that how desperately NSA relied on AT&T for its vast spying operations in the United States. NSA–AT&T's 30-Years-Old Friendship AT&T provided telecommunication interception facility to the United States' National Security Agency (NSA), and since 1985 they have been working hand in hand . AT&T cooperated in provided technical assistance in a manner that followed a secret court order which permitted the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters (also a customer of AT&T). Acc

The National Security Agency will restrict access to, and ultimately destroy, millions of US phone records previously collected by the spy agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced Monday. The federal law was passed in June ending the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. Citizen's Telephone records and destroying the data it collected under a controversial global spying program disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. So far, the ODNI didn't specify when the agency would destroy these metadata records , but noted that the metadata must be retained until the lawsuits around the metadata collection program are ongoing. NSA's Bulk Metadata Collection is illegal Section 215 of the Patriot Act legally authorizes the law enforcement agencies to collect "any tangible things" that the government proves are connected or linked to an investigation into any suspected terrorist. However, the verdict in May ruled that the mas

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has released a network security tool for Government and the private sectors to help secure their networks against cyber attacks. Dubbed Systems Integrity Management Platform (SIMP) , the tool is now publicly available on the popular source code sharing website GitHub . According to an official release from NSA, SIMP makes it easier for government organizations and the private sector to "fortify their networks against cyber threats." SIMP aims at providing a reasonable combination of security compliance and operational flexibility , keeping networked systems compliant with security standards and requirements. It is considered to be a critical part of a layered, "defence-in-depth" approach to information security. " By releasing SIMP, the agency seeks to reduce duplication of effort and promote greater collaboration within the community: The wheel would not have to be reinvented for every organiza

In wake of the latest revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) global spying on country's leaders, France may decide to offer political asylum to whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange , as a " symbolic gesture ." Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden , who is facing criminal espionage charges in the U.S., has remained in Russia for almost two years after exposing the United States government's worldwide surveillance programs and he awaits responses from two dozen countries where he'd like to live. WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange has remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for three years in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where Assange is facing sex crime allegations. French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told French news channel BFMTV on Thursday that if France decides to offer both of them asylum, she would "absolutely not be surprised." Recent WikiLeaks report claimed that the United States had been spying on

Just the way you swipe your smartphone screen is enough for your smartphone to identify you. Yes, it's a Fact, not Fiction! The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has a new technology that can identify you from the way your finger swipe strokes and text on a smartphone screen, according to officials with Lockheed Martin who helped design the technology. John Mears , a senior fellow for Lockheed IT and Security Solutions, told NextGov that Lockheed Martin has been working with the agency to create a " secure gesture authentication as a technique for using smartphones, " and " they are actually able to use it. " Mandrake – New Smartphone-Swipe Recognition Technology This new smartphone-swipe recognition technology, dubbed " Mandrake ," remotely analyses the curve, unique speed and acceleration of a person's finger strokes across their device's touchscreen. " Nobody else has the same strokes, " Mears ex

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

Edward Snowden is back with one of the biggest revelations about the government's widespread surveillance program. The US National Security Agency ( NSA ) and British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters ( GCHQ ) hacked into the networks of the world's biggest SIM card manufacturer, according to top-secret documents given to The Intercept by former NSA-contractor-turned-whistle blower, Edward Snowden . OPERATION DAPINO GAMMA The leaked documents suggests that in a joint operation, the NSA and the GCHQ formed the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET) in April 2010, and as the name suggests, the unit was built to target vulnerabilities in cellphone. Under an operation dubbed DAPINO GAMMA, the unit hacked into a Digital security company Gemalto , the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, and stole SIM Card Encryption Keys that are used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications. Gemalto, a huge company that operates in 85 countr

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