Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hackers have reportedly obtained documents that reveal how much money the FBI pays Microsoft each time agents try to obtain or view an individual customer’s communication information. The SEA, a group that has made headlines in the past for infiltrating Western media outlets that it perceives to be against Syrian President Bashar Assad, provided a trove of emails and invoices to the Daily Dot, which analyzed the documents before publishing them.
“The documents consist of what appear to be invoices and emails between Microsoft’s Global Criminal compliance team and the FBI’s Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), and purport to show exactly how much money Microsoft charges DITU, in terms of compliance costs, when DITU provides warrants and court orders for customers’ data,” wrote the Daily Dot’s Kevin Collier and Fran Berman.
Read moreStar Wars’ most loyal copilot has gone to the dark side on our side of the galaxy, as Malware operating under the name ‘ChewBacca’ has stolen data on 49,000 payment cards from 45 retailers in 11 countries over a two month span.
According to RSA FirstWatch, the Security Division of EMC which exposed the malignant software, the virus started running in October and has so far gathered 24 million transaction details, mostly in the US, but also in Canada, Australia and Russia. This relatively new Trojan was dubbed ‘ChewBacca’ because an image of the iconoclastic Wookiie was featured on the login page of the server, which the hacking ring used to collect data from infected computers.
Read moreIn an e-mail sent to BSD project leader Theo de Raadt, former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry has claimed that NETSEC developers helped the FBI plant "a number of backdoors" in the OpenBSD cryptographic framework approximately a decade ago.
Perry says that his nondisclosure agreement with the FBI has expired, allowing him to finally bring the issue to the attention of OpenBSD developers. Perry also suggests that knowledge of the FBI's backdoors played a role in DARPA's decision to withdraw millions of dollars of grant funding from OpenBSD in 2003. "This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon the same."
Read moreInternet experts say huge chunks of sensitive web traffic have been routinely hijacked by hackers and diverted to foreign computers, compromising the data of victims in at least 150 cities worldwide.
Researchers at New Hampshire-based global internet intelligence company Renesys say that they’ve witnessed a complex type of Man-in-the-Middle attack occur on computer networks no fewer than 60 days this year already, the likes of which they say should never have happened. The method of attack exploits a vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, and takes advantage of the fact that much of the information routed through the global system of networks.
Read moreWikiLeaks has released a trove of encrypted “insurance” data on Twitter and Facebook. The data can’t be read without an encryption key, but the movement’s supporters say that could be published later in case anything happens to leading WikiLeaks figures.
The whistleblowing organization published links for a massive 400 gigabytes worth of encrypted data it described as “insurance documents” on its Twitter and Facebook accounts. It is possible to download the files but advanced encoding prevents them from being opened. The group described encryption as a necessary measure in light of previous attempts to block its leaking of classified information.
Read moreMichele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which begs the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?
The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depends on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, includes a variety of federal agencies. Among them: the FBI and Homeland Security.
Read moreDeutsche Telecom Company staff cooperates with American secret services for more than 10 years. According to Focus the representatives of the company provided information to FBI from 2000. There occurred a document in edition of Focus magazine that points the German company representatives cooperate with FBI very close from 2000.
This cooperation began when German company had bought American company Voice Stream Wireless (now known as T-Mobile). After purchasing American company Germans had to sign a special agreement with American secret services that requires the disclosure of information.
Read moreThe National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind.
The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers.
Read moreGoogle was sentenced to disclose to the FBI users' data without a court warrant first. The decision on the case of Google, which tried to challenge the demands of the deadly Bureau, was issued by an American federal court. The hearing was held behind the closed doors.Google officials tried to challenge the FBI's demands.
The court considered 19 requests from the FBI which contradict the American constitution. However, the court decided Google must execute 17 demands and demands for additional information on two more users. The court left for Google to challenge individual queries if the company finds formal infringements. The lawsuit does not end there: Google intends to appeal the decision, and the FBI threatened to proceed against the company for failure to cooperate with investigations.
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