PRISM | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden managed to stay out of sight for two weeks since arriving from Hong Kong on June 23, amid rising hopes he may finally be able to leave Russia after being offered asylum by Venezuela. Many travelers, journalists and Agents are trying to spot him, who are waiting in the interconnected transit area between terminals D, E and F, a maze of corridors, lounges, fast food restaurants and duty free shops of Moscow's Sheremetyevo international airport. Russia already refuses USA request of Snowden extradition, by saying that he is in transit area where passengers stay between flights is neutral territory and he will be on Russian soil only if he goes through passport control. Snowden may have been kept in a secret area, perhaps underground, or moved around from day to day to avoid detection. Venezuela's leftist President Nicolas Maduro offered to grant " humanitarian asylum ". The invitations came as Snowden sent

Members of Iceland's Pirate Party  have introduced a proposal in Parliament that would grant immediate citizenship to National Security Agency Whistleblower Edward Snowden . The government is however not keen on helping Snowden. The bill to grant Snowden citizenship received limited support Thursday. Six members of minority parties were in favor out of Parliament's 63 members . Ogmundur Jonasson, Icelandic MP for the Left-Green Movement, said at parliament this morning that US authorities violated the Icelandic constitution when they spied on Icelandic citizens.  He referred to the 71st article of the constitution which states: " It is not allowed to search a person, his house or personal effects, unless according to a court order or a special legal basis. The same thing applies to research on documents and mail deliveries, phone calls and other telecommunications.. ." Snowden is believed to be stuck in a Moscow airport transit area, seeking asylum

The need for vCISO services is growing. SMBs and SMEs are dealing with more third-party risks, tightening regulatory demands and stringent cyber insurance requirements than ever before. However, they often lack the resources and expertise to hire an in-house security executive team. By outsourcing security and compliance leadership to a vCISO, these organizations can more easily obtain cybersecurity expertise specialized for their industry and strengthen their cybersecurity posture. MSPs and MSSPs looking to meet this growing vCISO demand are often faced with the same challenge. The demand for cybersecurity talent far exceeds the supply. This has led to a competitive market where the costs of hiring and retaining skilled professionals can be prohibitive for MSSPs/MSPs as well. The need to maintain expertise of both security and compliance further exacerbates this challenge. Cynomi, the first AI-driven vCISO platform , can help. Cynomi enables you - MSPs, MSSPs and consulting firms

The US isn't the only western country with an Digital eye i.e PRISM like  surveillance program , designed to monitor internet and phone communications . French is leading member at European Parliament and they voted to launch an in-depth inquiry against the US's based PRISM surveillance project. The fact that the French DGSE is itself engaged in similar program should make for some awkward proceedings as that inquiry gets underway. France's General Directorate for External Security has a PRISM like system that intercept and processes the metadata for billions and billions of communications, including internet messaging, phone calls , SMS and even faxes. The one difference being that PRISM was used to spy on international targets whereas the DGSE were only keeping a watch on the French. According to French newspaper, Le Monde - program goal is ostensibly to track the behavior of terrorist cells, but the Directorate allegedly shares the anonymized informa

Edward Snowden , a former NSA systems analyst, have revealed the NSA's sweeping data collection of U.S. phone records and some Internet traffic and the programs target foreigners and terrorist suspects mostly overseas. According to the Constitution of all countries, capturing and reading emails or text messages without privileges is illegal . Several Asian and European countries is worried about the US spying. Today a Germany's top security official has warned, " If you are worried about the US spying on you, you need to stop using Google and Facebook. " Internet users who fear their data is being intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency's should stay away from American websites run through American servers, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said. " If these reports are true, it's disgusting. The United States would be better off monitoring its secret services rather than its allies. " Head of t

The recent exposes and revelations by Edward Snowden about the Top Secret Internet Snooping program currently run by US National Security Agency (NSA) have shocked the world. The extent of snooping is even more shocking and what has just stunned the world is the sheer name of top Internet companies who had shared data of all their users and not to forget except Microsoft, all of them namely Google, Facebook, and Apple have longed established themselves as the outright defenders of free speech and Right to Privacy . Many of them are funders and donors of Electronic frontier foundation in US. The recently formed renowned organization defending right to privacy and free speech on Internet . Though much is being written about the extent of snooping, leaked Memos, Obama's Admissions, NSA's careful acceptance of the snooping Program but What bothers me is the stand of Indian Government in this mess. We are reportedly 5th most spied country by US NSA under this program and

A Russian immigration source informed that the US intelligence agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has applied for political asylum in Russia. Few days back, Russian president Vladimir Putin has said Russia would never hand over Mr Snowden over to the United States but that if Snowden wants to stay in Russia he " must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners. " He initially fled from Hawaii to Hong Kong and then to Russia . The US has annulled his passport, and Ecuador, where he had hoped to get asylum, has been coy over offering him shelter. Sarah Harrison is an employee of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks , who accompanied Mr Snowden on his trip from Hong Kong. " Snowden is not a Russian agent ", Putin said on Monday, and that Russian intelligence services were not working with the fugitive American, who is believed to remain in the transit area at a Moscow airport eight days after arriving from Hong Kong. Speaking at a news confe

The NSA surveillance program PRISM story was started with four leaked slides from the Washington Post weeks before and today they has revealed four more annotated slides about the NSA operation, along with detailing the various levels of scrutiny from the FBI and NSA that happen before, during and after approved wiretaps take place. According to new slides, The NSA can track real-time events such as email logins or the sending of email, and the logging in or out of a user to a chat service. For live communications, this data goes straight to the NSA's PRINTAURA filtering system, while both the FBI and NSA scan pre-recorded data independently. Two of the new slides detail the data collection process, from the initial input of an agency analyst, to data analysis under several previously-reported analysis tools such as Marina (internet data), Mainway (call records), Nucleon (voice data), and Pinwale (video data). There were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM

For years the National Security Agency has successfully shielded its surveillance programs from any real public scrutiny. There have been a lot of news stories about NSA surveillance programs following the leaks of secret documents by Edward Snowden . We have learned that the NSA is collecting millions of Americans' phone records on a daily basis, that it operates a program called PRISM involving the surveillance of Internet communications, including Email, Facebook posts, and instant messages. The NSA is allowed to record the conversations of non-Americans without a specific warrant for each person monitored, if at least one end of the conversation is outside of the U.S. It is also allowed to record the communications of Americans if they are outside the U.S. and the NSA first gets a warrant for each case. Because Facebook is using outdated Web encryption, which cryptographers say the NSA could penetrate reasonably quickly after intercepting the communications using 

Once again NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the truth, that the NSA hacks into China's mobile operators to steal millions of text messages.  Every month Washington come up with new reports  and accuse other nations, particularly China, for cyber hacking , but the biggest culprit of such crime is in fact the United States. All of this appeared to go relatively well for Washington until revelations emerged of the U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program . According to Snowden, U.S. spies had hacked 3 major mobile phone companies in China and a core network to steal text messages of millions of Chinese citizens. Fang Binxing, a President at Beijing University who is considered the chief pioneer of China's Great Firewall Internet filtering system, has warned in the past that telecom equipment from international companies like Cisco is a threat to China's national security. As such, it could have allowed NSA operatives to access int

The Britain's spy agency GCHQ is running an online eavesdropping operation that has gained secret access to more than 200 optical fiber cables carrying global Internet traffic and telephone calls. The existence of the program has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called the largest program of suspicion less surveillance in human history. Dubbed as , Operation Tempora has been running for around 18 months and allows GCHQ to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days. GCHQ is also sharing this sensitive personal information with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA). The paper said GCHQ is tapping 200 internet links in total, each with a data rate of 10Gbps, with the agency having the technical capacity to concurrently analyze 46 of these 200 streams of data at a time. That access could

Apple revealed on monday that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 data requests in six months from  U.S. law enforcement for user information and affected accounts. Apple said the most common forms of requests involved investigating robberies and other crimes.  Period between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013, federal, state and local law enforcement had requested customer information up to 5,000 times, related to between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. But the iPhone maker said it works vigorously to protect the privacy of its users and only provides information by court order.  " We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers' privacy as they expect and deserve, " statement from Apple. Apple doesn't provide some types of information either because the company doesn't retain it or because it is encrypted , the company said.  Apple also specified certain types of co

If you have followed the startling revelations about the scope of the US government's surveillance efforts, you may have thought you were reading about the end of privacy, and about the Enemies of the Internet. " My computer was arrested before I was ." a perceptive comment by an internet activist who had been arrested by means of online surveillance.  Online surveillance is a growing danger for journalists, bloggers, citizen-journalists and human rights defenders. Over the last few years, law enforcement agencies have been pushing for unprecedented powers of surveillance and access to your private online communications. This week the PRISM surveillance scandal has consumed the Internet as the implications of massive scale U.S. Government spying begin to sink in. The US National Security Organization (NSA) is almost certainly one of (if not the) most technologically sophisticated, well-funded and secretive organizations in the world. The Prism initiative was launched by Na

Edward Snowden, the self confessed NSA Whistleblower of secret surveillance documents, claimed Wednesday that the United States intelligence agents have been hacking computer networks around the world, specially Chinese targets since 2009. Snowden alleged that the Prism program , which collects information on users of numerous technological services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, targeted universities, businesses and public officials throughout mainland China and Hong Kong. Out of More than 61,000 targets of the National Security Agency , there are thousands of computers in China which U.S. officials have increasingly criticized as the source of thousands of attacks on U.S. military and commercial networks. China has denied such attacks. " We hack network backbones like huge Internet routers, basically that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one ," he revealed. But why Snowden leaking all this infor

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden , a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton . He's a high school dropout who worked his way into the most secretive computers in U.S. intelligence as a defense contractor and identify himself as the source of leaks about US surveillance programmes - PRISM . He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations the NSA. Verax was the name he chose for himself, " truth teller " in Latin. In an interview with The Guardian , Snowden publicly revealed himself as the source of documents outlining a massive effort by the U.S. National Security Agency to track cell phone calls and monitor the e-mail and Internet traffic of virtually all Americans.  Before his leak of U.S. intelligence, Snowden was living in paradise, working for a major U.S. go

The National Security Agency , part of the U.S. military reportedly has a direct line into the systems of some of the world's biggest Web and tech companies, i.e Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM , 6-year-old program which allows officials to collect real-time information and as well as stored material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, according to reports in the Washington Post . Project PRISM may be the first of its kind and also  GCHQ , Britain's equivalent of the NSA, also has been secretly gathering intelligence from the same internet companies through an operation set up by the NSA. Later confirmed by the White House and members of Congress as saying that the government routinely seeks information in its fight to thwart domestic and international terrorism. Other services that are reportedly part of PRISM include PalTalk, Skype, and AOL.