The U.S. National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans' phone calls last year, even after Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records.
The report from the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015 USA Freedom Act, which limited the NSA to collecting phone records and contacts of people U.S. and allied intelligence agencies suspect may have ties to terrorism. It found that the NSA collected the 151 million records even though it had warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to spy on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016.
Read moreIt's been little over a week and a half since a hacker crew called the Shadow Brokers released a batch of tools believed to have belonged to the NSA, designed to break through the defences of Windows systems.
Whilst Microsoft mysteriously patched its operating system to deflect attacks using the exploits a month before Shadow Brokers went public, the number of infected systems is still rising fast, as malicious hackers the world over take advantage of those who chose not to update. And Russia's cybercriminals have been tinkering with the leaked NSA arsenal as they look to piggyback on the technical prowess of America's finest digital spies.
Read moreHacker group Shadow Brokers released a fresh batch of alleged NSA hacking tools, which security experts said contain a whole host of exploits capable of causing widespread cyber panic.
One such tool uncovered by security researchers hints at the first real connection between the NSA and the infamous Stuxnet worm, which made headlines in 2010 after it was used against Iran, in what is considered as one of the first targeted cyberespionage attacks. Previous reports indicate that Stuxnet has long been suspected to have been developed by a collaborative effort between the NSA and Israel.
Read moreThanks to the Shadow Brokers, any hacker can now easily attack and pwn millions of Windows computers on the internet.
On Friday, the group known as The Shadow Brokers dropped the hacking equivalent of a bomb, or perhaps several bombs, giving hackers all over the world the tools to easily break into millions of Windows computers. "This is internet god mode for Microsoft computers," a security researcher told in an online chat. After weeks of silence, The Shadow Brokers came back last Saturday to drop a long-awaited set of files that turned out to be just underwhelming, old Linux hacking tools
Read moreA group calling itself “Shadow Brokers” says it has released another gem from its trove of high-level hacking tools stolen from the U.S.’s National Security Agency, potentially offering added insight into how America’s spies operate online.
The leak discloses NSA-style codenames and carries internet protocol information about scores of organizations, many based in Japan, China and South Korea. Matthew Hickey, co-founder of UK-based cybersecurity consultancy Hacker House, said it was plausible that the servers would have seen use as staging posts to help obfuscate the origin of electronic eavesdropping operations.
Read moreA House intelligence committee report condemned Edward Snowden, saying the National Security Agency leaker is not a whistleblower and that the vast majority of the documents he stole were defense secrets that had nothing to do with privacy.
The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove more than 1.5 million classified documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to US national security. Snowden was an NSA contract employee when he leaked the documents to journalists.
Read moreLeaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed how his former employer used the US spy base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire to conduct ‘kill or capture’ missions in its global shadow war.
The new files published by the Intercept partly lay to rest speculation by journalists and campaigners over what really goes on at the US base. They show that secretive NSA kill-capture operations in the Middle East have been developed and initiated from inside the base’s heavily guarded perimeter wire. The programs, which carry names like GHOSTWOLF and GHOSTHUNTER, have been used to support conventional operations in war zones.
Read moreA hacking group calling itself the “ShadowBrokers” announced an auction for what it claimed were “cyber weapons” made by the NSA.
Based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, The Intercept can confirm that the arsenal contains authentic NSA software, part of a powerful constellation of tools used to covertly infect computers worldwide. The provenance of the code has been a matter of heated debate this week among cybersecurity experts, and while it remains unclear how the software leaked, one thing is now beyond speculation: The malware is covered with the NSA’s virtual fingerprints and clearly originates from the agency.
Read moreA mysterious hacker or hackers going by the name “The Shadow Brokers” claims to have hacked a group linked to the NSA and dumped a bunch of its hacking tools. In a bizarre twist, the hackers are also asking for 1 million bitcoin in an auction to release more files.
The hackers referred to their victims as the Equation Group, a codename for a government hacking group widely believed to be the NSA. The security firm Kaspersky Lab unmasked Equation Group in 2015, billing it as the most advanced hacking group Kaspersky researchers had ever seen. The Shadow Brokers claimed to have hacked the Equation Group and stolen some of its hacking tools.
Read moreWhat do spies use to chat online? A terribly ugly Windows programme. At least, that's what the Five Eyes intelligence alliance was using back in 2003, according to a newly released Snowden document.
“The Five-Eyes SIGINT [signals intelligence] Directors will soon be using a new tool to enhance their collaboration on subjects ranging from current intelligence objectives to future collection planning,” reads an issue of SID Today, the NSA's internal newsletter, dating from September 2003. InfoWorkSpace, as the tool is called, allowed text chat, audio conferencing, shared screen views, and virtual whiteboards, the newsletter explains.
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