spying | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

German authorities said they have issued arrest warrants against three citizens on suspicion of spying for China. The full names of the defendants were not disclosed by the Office of the Federal Prosecutor (aka Generalbundesanwalt), but it includes Herwig F., Ina F., and Thomas R. "The suspects are strongly suspected of working for a Chinese secret service since an unspecified date before June 2022," the Generalbundesanwalt  said . Thomas R. is believed to have acted as an agent for China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), gathering information about innovative technologies in Germany that could be used for military purposes. The defendant also sought the help of a married couple, Herwig F. and Ina F., who run a Düsseldorf-based business that established connections with the scientific and research community in Germany. This materialized in the form of an agreement with an unnamed German university to conduct a study for an...

A former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) employee has been arrested on charges of attempting to sell classified information to a foreign spy, who was actually an undercover agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, was employed at the NSA for less than a month from June 6, 2022, to July 1, 2022, serving as an Information Systems Security Designer as part of a temporary assignment in Washington D.C. According to an  affidavit  filed by the FBI, Dalke was also a member of the U.S. Army from about 2015 to 2018 and held a Secret security clearance, which he received in 2016. The defendant further held a Top Secret security clearance during his tenure at the NSA. "Between August and September 2022, Dalke used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents he had obtained during his employment to an individual Dalke believed to be working for a foreign government," the Justice Department (DoJ) ...

A former Twitter employee has been pronounced guilty for his role in digging up private information pertaining to certain Twitter users and turning over that data to Saudi Arabia. Ahmad Abouammo, 44, was convicted by a jury after a two-week trial in San Francisco federal court, Bloomberg  reported  Tuesday. He faces up to 20 years in prison when sentenced. The  verdict  comes nearly three years after Abouammo, along with Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi (Ahmed Aljbreen) were  indicted in 2019  for acting as "illegal agents" of Saudi Arabia, with the former also charged with destroying, altering, and falsifying records in a federal investigation. Prosecutors accused Abouammo and Alzabarah, both of whom joined Twitter in 2013, of being enlisted by officials of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for  unmasking its critics  on the social media platform. According to court documents, both individuals leveraged their access to internal systems to unauth...

A man from the U.K. city of Nottingham has been sentenced to more than two years in prison for illegally breaking into the phones and computers of a number of victims, including women and children, to spy on them and amass a collection of indecent images. Robert Davies, 32, is said to have purchased an arsenal of cyber crime tools in 2019, including crypters and remote administration tools (RATs), which can be used as a backdoor to steal personal information and conduct surveillance through microphones and cameras, catching the attention of the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA). The cyber voyeur's modus operandi involved catfishing potential targets by using fake profiles on different messaging apps such as Skype, leveraging the online encounters to send rogue links hosting the malware through the chats. "Davies was infecting his victims' phones or computers with malicious software by disguising it with the crypters so their antivirus protection would not detect it,...

Meta Platforms on Thursday revealed it took steps to deplatform seven cyber mercenaries that it said carried out "indiscriminate" targeting of journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists located in over 100 countries, amid mounting scrutiny of surveillance technologies. To that end, the company  said  it alerted 50,000 users of Facebook and Instagram that their accounts were spied on by the companies, who offer a variety of services that run the spyware gamut from hacking tools for infiltrating mobile phones to creating fake social media accounts to monitor targets. It also removed 1,500 Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to these firms. "The global surveillance-for-hire industry targets people across the internet to collect intelligence, manipulate them into revealing information and compromise their devices and accounts," Meta's David Agranovich and Mike Dvilyanski said. "These compa...