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CIA, FBI launch manhunt for leaker who gave top-secret documents to WikiLeaks
Last Updated Apr 20, 2017 1:38 PM EDT
WASHINGTON -- CBS News has learned that a manhunt is underway for a traitor inside the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA and FBI are conducting a joint investigation into one of the worst security breaches in CIA history, which exposed thousands of top-secret documents that described CIA tools used to penetrate smartphones, smart televisions and computer systems.
Sources familiar with the investigation say it is looking for an insider -- either a CIA employee or contractor -- who had physical access to the material. The agency has not said publicly when the material was taken or how it was stolen.
Much of the material was classified and stored in a highly secure section of the intelligence agency, but sources say hundreds of people would have had access to the material. Investigators are going through those names.
The trove was published in March by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks.
In his first public comments as director of the CIA just last week, Mike Pompeo railed against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
“It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he said.
WikiLeaks has said it obtained the CIA information from former contractors who worked for U.S. intelligence. The CIA has not commented on the authenticity of the WikiLeaks disclosures or on the status of the investigation. |
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There are no conversations. |
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Bobby Ray Inman |
Another factor is the decision, made in 1976, to sharply divide the FBI and the foreign intelligence agencies. The FBI would collect within the United States; the foreign intelligence agencies would collect overseas. |
David Baker |
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses. |
Peter Ackroyd |
'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself. |
Ibrahim Babangida |
With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history. |
Frank Abagnale |
If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been 'Catch Me In Two Days'. |
Frank Abagnale |
My proudest moment was probably when my oldest boy finished law school and went on to become an FBI agent. It was just beyond my imagination that - with my background - my own son would become an FBI agent. |
Soren Kierkegaard |
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. |
Anne Frank |
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is! |
Scott Ian |
I kind of live in this weird world where I am exposed to a lot of stuff, but then again I am not exposed to a lot of stuff. |
Adam Davidson |
The America that I think most Americans would want, most economists on the right or left would want, is one in which a smart, ambitious, hardworking person without a huge amount of resources has a pretty good shot, in the end, of beating out a less smart, less ambitious, less hardworking rich person. |
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Lawsuit Reveals How Facebook Profited Off Confused Children: Report
Documents outlining how Facebook profited off children are expected to be made public soon, according to Reveal News of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), who requested the documents. From a report:
In a report about the trove of previously-sealed documents, Reveal News explains that Facebook has previously faced lawsuits for failing to refund charges made by children playing games on Facebook. According to Reveal, the children did not know that their parent's credit card was stored on the platform when they cli...
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Earlier today, WikiLeaks unleashed a cache of thousands of files it calls "Year Zero," which is part one of the release associated with "Vault 7." Since there are over 8,000 pages in this release, it will take some time for journalists to comb through the release. The Independent has highlighted six of the "biggest secrets and pieces of information yet to emerge from the huge dump" in their report. 1) The CIA has the ability to break into Android and iPhone handsets, and all kinds of computers. The U.S. intelligence agency has been involved in a concerted effort to write various kinds of malware to spy on just about every piece of electronic equipment that people use. That includes iPhones, Androids and computers running Windows, macOS and Linux. 2) Doing so would make apps like Signal, T...
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Man Allegedly Used Change Of Address Form To Move UPS Headquarters To His Apartment (npr.org)
As federal crimes go, this one seems to have been ridiculously easy to pull off. From a report: Dushaun Henderson-Spruce submitted a U.S. Postal Service change of address form on Oct. 26, 2017, according to court documents. He requested changing a corporation's mailing address from an address in Atlanta to the address of his apartment on Chicago's North Side. The post office duly updated the address, and Henderson-Spruce allegedly began receiving the company's mail -- including checks. It went on for months. Prosecutors say he deposited some $58,000 in checks improperly forwarded to his address. ...
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Contractors Lose Jobs After Hacking CIA's In-House Vending Machines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRepublic: Today's vending machines are likely to be bolted to the floor or each other and are much more sophisticated -- possibly containing machine intelligence, and belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT). Hacking this kind of vending machine obviously requires a more refined approach. The type security professionals working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might conjure up, according to journalists Jason Leopold and David Mack, who first broke the story A Bunch Of CIA Contractors Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines. In their BuzzFeed post, the...
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The NSA began rapidly escalating its hacking efforts a decade ago. In 2004, according to secret internal records, the agency was managing a small network of only 100 to 150 implants. But over the next six to eight years, as an elite unit called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) recruited new hackers and developed new malware tools, the number of implants soared to tens of thousands.
To penetrate foreign computer networks and monitor communications that it did not have access to through other means, the NSA wanted to go beyond the limits of traditional signals intelligence, or SIGINT, the agency?s term for the interception of electronic communications. Instead, it sought to broaden ?active? surveillance methods ? tactics designed to directly infiltrate a target?s computers or network devic...
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Hackers Broke Into An SEC Database and Made Millions From Inside Information, Says DOJ
Federal prosecutors unveiled charges in an international stock-trading scheme that involved hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR corporate filing system. "The scheme allegedly netted $4.1 million for fraudsters from the U.S., Russia and Ukraine," reports CNBC. "Using 157 corporate earnings announcements, the group was able to execute trades on material nonpublic information. Most of those filings were 'test filings,' which corporations upload to the SEC's website." From the report: The scheme involves seven individuals and operated from May to at least October 2016. Prosecutors sa...
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Investigation Finds Inmates Built Computers, Hid Them In Prison Ceiling
The discovery of two working computers hidden in a ceiling at the Marion Correctional Institution prompted an investigation by the state into how inmates got access. In late July, 2015 staff at the prison discovered the computers hidden on a plywood board in the ceiling above a training room closet. The computers were also connected to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's network. Authorities say they were first tipped off to a possible problem in July, when their computer network support team got an alert that a computer "exceeded a daily internet usage threshold." When they checked the login being used, they discovered an employee's credentials were being used on days he wasn't scheduled to work. ...
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WPA2 Security Flaw Puts Almost Every Wi-Fi Device at Risk of Hijack, Eavesdropping
A security protocol at the heart of most modern Wi-Fi devices, including computers, phones, and routers, has been broken, putting almost every wireless-enabled device at risk of attack. From a report: The bug, known as "KRACK" for Key Reinstallation Attack, exposes a fundamental flaw in WPA2, a common protocol used in securing most modern wireless networks. Mathy Vanhoef, a computer security academic, who found the flaw, said the weakness lies in the protocol's four-way handshake, which securely allows new devices with a pre-shared password to join the network. That weakness can, at its worst, allow an atta...
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Hacker Group Leaks 'NSA's Top Secret Arsenal of Digital Weapons'
Hacker group 'The Shadow Brokers', which last year allegedly released top-secret tools that the National Security Agency had used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets, today said it is disappointed with President Donald Trump, and released more such alleged tools. From a report on Motherboard: On Saturday, The Shadow Brokers, a hacker or group of hackers that has previously dumped NSA hacking tools, released more alleged exploits. The group published a password for an encrypted cache of files they distributed last year. "Be considering this our form of protest," the group wrote in a r...
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Google Says Almost All CPUs Since 1995 Vulnerable To 'Meltdown' And 'Spectre' Flaws
Google has just published details on two vulnerabilities named Meltdown and Spectre that in the company's assessment affect "every processor [released] since 1995." Google says the two bugs can be exploited to "to steal data which is currently processed on the computer," which includes "your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents." Furthermore, Google says that tests on virtual machines used in cloud computing environments extracted data from other customers using the same server. The bugs were discovered by Jann Horn, a security researcher with Google Project Zero, Google's elite security team. These are the ...
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