WikiLeaks publication | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The United States Justice Department has unveiled charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 new counts on the alleged violation of the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks website. If convicted for all counts, Assange could face a maximum sentence of 175 years in U.S. prison for his "alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." Assange was arrested last month in London after Ecuador abruptly withdrew his asylum and later sentenced to 50 weeks in U.K. prison for breaching his bail conditions in 2012. The 47-year-old is currently facing extradition to the United States for his role in publishing thousands of classified diplomatic and military documents on WikiLeaks in 2010 that embarrassed the U.S. governments across the world. Though the previous indictment charged Assange with just one count of helping former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning c...

Adrian Lamo, the hacker who tipped off the FBI about Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning, dies at the age of 37, according to a Facebook post by his father Mario Lamo-Jiménez. "With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian's friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son..."  he posted. At this moment the cause of death is unknown, though reportedly Adrian was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in July 2010 and briefly hospitalized. Adrian was a former hacker, threat analyst, and writer, who had previously been behind several high-profile security breaches but gained headlines after breaking into The New York Times computer systems in 2002. Adrian was given the appellation " Homeless Hacker " by the media because once when he was unemployed he wandered the country by Greyhound bus and hacked corporations from inside abandoned buildings. He spent almost six mont...

When people think of cybersecurity threats, they often picture external hackers breaking into networks. However, some of the most damaging breaches stem from within organizations. Whether through negligence or malicious intent, insiders can expose your organization to significant cybersecurity risks. According to Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report , 57% of companies experience over 20 insider-related security incidents a year, with human error involved in 68% of data breaches. With that, insider attacks result in the highest costs, averaging USD 4.99 million per attack, as per the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM Security.  What are insider threats? An insider threat originates from within an organization – it's the potential for anyone with authorized access to your critical systems to misuse their access, harming your organization. The worst part is that insiders are already within your IT perimeter and are familiar with your internal security prot...

WikiLeaks has just published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak , this time detailing an alleged CIA project that allowed the agency to hack and remotely spy on computers running the Linux operating systems. Dubbed OutlawCountry , the project allows the CIA hackers to redirect all outbound network traffic on the targeted computer to CIA controlled computer systems for exfiltrate and infiltrate data. The OutlawCountry Linux hacking tool consists of a kernel module, which the CIA hackers load via shell access to the targeted system and create a hidden Netfilter table with an obscure name on a target Linux user. "The new table allows certain rules to be created using the "iptables" command. These rules take precedence over existing rules, and are only visible to an administrator if the table name is known. When the Operator removes the kernel module, the new table is also removed," CIA's leaked  user manual reads. Although the installation and persi...

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...

The whistleblowing website Wikileaks from tonight releasing more than 100 U.S. Defense Department files detailing military detention policies in camps in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in the years after the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets - " The Detainee Policies " In a statement , WikiLeaks criticized regulations it said had led to abuse and impunity and urged human rights activists to use the documents to research what it called policies of unaccountability . WikiLeaks says it plans to release the files in chronological order to paint a picture of the evolution of America's military detainee practices. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: " The 'Detainee Policies' show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the U.S. Department of Defense. It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown...