FBI starts three probes in suspected Russian hacking of U.S presidential elections

Image Credit: Venture Beat

  19 Feb 2017 , 11:11

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is pursuing at least three separate probes relating to alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential elections, according to five current and former government officials with direct knowledge of the situation. While the fact that the FBI is investigating had been reported previously by the New York Times and other media, these officials shed new light on both the precise number of inquires and their focus.

The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which runs many cyber security investigations, is trying to identify the people behind breaches of the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, the officials said. Those breaches, in 2015 and the first half of 2016, exposed the internal communications of party officials as the Democratic nominating convention got underway and helped undermine support for Hillary Clinton.

The Pittsburgh case has progressed furthest, but Justice Department officials in Washington believe there is not enough clear evidence yet for an indictment, two of the sources said. Meanwhile the bureau’s San Francisco office is trying to identify the people who called themselves “Guccifer 2” and posted emails stolen from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account, the sources said. Those emails contained details about fundraising by the Clinton Foundation and other topics.

Beyond the two FBI field offices, FBI counterintelligence agents based in Washington are pursuing leads from informants and foreign communications intercepts, two of the people said. This counterintelligence inquiry includes but is not limited to examination of financial transactions by Russian individuals and companies who are believed to have links to Trump associates. The transactions under scrutiny involve investments by Russians in overseas entities that appear to have been undertaken through middlemen and front companies, two people briefed on the probe said.

Reuters could not confirm which entities and individuals were under scrutiny. Scott Smith, the FBI’s new assistant director for cyber crime, declined to comment this week on which FBI offices were doing what or how far they had progressed. The White House had no comment on Friday on the Russian hacking investigations. A spokesman pointed to a comment Trump made during the campaign, in which he said: “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.”

During a news conference Thursday, President Donald Trump said he had no business connections to Russia. The people who spoke to Reuters also corroborated a Tuesday New York Times report that Americans with ties to Trump or his campaign had repeated contacts with current and former Russian intelligence officers before the November election. Those alleged contacts are among the topics of the FBI counterintelligence investigation.

Reuters

Twitter releases letters that reveal extent of US Government’s demands for user data

  28 Jan 2017 , 12:20

Twitter on Saturday became the latest tech giant after Yahoo, Cloudflare and Google to release national security letters (NSLs) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that forced them to reveal user data to the government.

The tech companies have been speaking up since the last eight months about the NSLs “that came with gag orders that prevented Twitter from telling the public or the targeted users about the government’s demands in two letters it received in 2015 and 2016”, Tech Crunch reported.

The FBI recently lifted these gag orders, allowing Twitter to acknowledge the NSLs for the first time.

In the newly published NSLs, the FBI asked Twitter to turn over “the name, address, length of service, and electronic communications transactional records” of two users.

The micro-blogging site said it gave a “very limited set of data” in response to the requests and demanded more freedom in keeping their point.

“Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive, Twitter associate general counsel Elizabeth Banker wrote in a blog post.

“We would like a meaningful opportunity to challenge government restrictions when ‘classification’ prevents speech on issues of public importance,” Banker added.

Twitter has already disclosed these two letters and informed the targeted users and is suing the Department of Justice in an effort to speak more publicly about secret requests for user data.

IANS

FBI releases documents with deleted details, pertaining to the the San Bernandino iPhone hacking case

#FBI

Image Credit: REUTERS

  08 Jan 2017 , 12:06

The FBI has released 100 pages of heavily censored documents related to its agreement with an unidentified vendor to hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, but it did not identify whom it paid to perform the work or how much it cost.

The records were provided Friday in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the FBI by The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.

The media organizations sued in September to learn how much the FBI paid and who it hired to break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people at a holiday gathering of county workers in December 2015. The FBI for weeks had maintained that only Apple Inc. could access the information on its phone, which was protected by encryption, but ultimately broke or bypassed Apple’s digital locks with the help of an unnamed third party.

The FBI, in its records release Friday, censored critical details that would have shown how much the FBI paid, whom it hired and how it opened the phone. The files had been marked “secret” before they were turned over under the lawsuit.

The files make clear that the FBI signed a nondisclosure agreement with the vendor. The records also show that the FBI received at least three inquiries from companies interested in developing a product to unlock the phone, but none had the ability to come up with a solution fast enough for the FBI.

The FBI also said in contracting documents that it did not solicit competing bids or proposals because it thought widely disclosing the bureau’s needs could harm national security.

The lawsuit was filed months after the FBI’s sudden announcement in March that it had purchased a tool from an unidentified third party to open Farook’s phone. The disclosure aborted a court fight that began when a federal judge had directed Apple to help the FBI break into the phone.

The suit by the media organizations argued there was no legal basis to withhold the information and challenged the adequacy of the FBI’s search for relevant records. It also said the public had a right to know whether the vendor has adequate security measures, is a proper recipient of government funds and will act only in the public interest.

In refusing to provide the records, the FBI said the records had been compiled for law enforcement purposes and might interfere with ongoing enforcement proceedings, even though at the time the shooters were both dead and there were no indications others were involved.

It was the third lawsuit the AP has filed against the Obama administration under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Associated Press

CyberZeist, a hacker breaches FBI website and posts information on Pastebin

Representational image

  05 Jan 2017 , 11:52

A hacker has claimed to have breached the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s website and leaked personal account information to a public site, media reported. The hacker, known as CyberZeist, exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the highly-secured Plone Content Management System (CMS) of the FBI’s website and leaked some of the information to Pastebin, an open source site that is often used by hackers to post stolen information and bits of code, RT.com reported on Thursday.

View image on Twitter

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CyberZeist @cyberzeist2

FBI trying to patch-up their Plone CMS #0day at http://fbi.gov , too late!! #ComingSoon #NewYearsEve

12:22 PM - 31 Dec 2016

 
•  9292 Retweets
 
•  9292 likes

A zero-day fault is a vulnerability in the code that has not been detected, listed, or patched yet. Therefore, the FBI had zero days to respond to the attack. This is not the first time the hacker claimed breaching the FBI site. In 2011, CyberZeist is believed to have hacked the FBI site as a member of a group known as Anonymous.

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CyberZeist @cyberzeist2

http://fbi.gov  CMS Exploited, files in view - PasswordResetTool.py, product permissions, setup file. More coming soon #FBI#PWNED

3:27 PM - 22 Dec 2016

 
•  6767 Retweets
 
•  8282 likes

Authorities in the US have not yet responded to the recent hacking incident that was claimed to have occurred last month. “fbi.gov CMS Exploited, files in view – PasswordResetTool.py, product permissions, setup file. More coming soon #FBI #PWNED,” the hacker had tweeted on December 22.

View image on Twitter

 Follow

CyberZeist @cyberzeist2

CC: @Amnesty_Schweiz restrict public access to "acl_users" directory (https://www.amnesty.ch/acl_users/ ), your copy of Plone CMS is vulnerable too!

3:38 PM - 24 Dec 2016

 
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•  1111 likes

“Don’t blame the #hacker, blame the faulty #code!,” CyberZeist had said in another tweet on December 27. CyberZeist warned other agencies that are currently using the Plone CMS that they too are vulnerable to a similar attack. “Amnesty acknowledges to patch the Plone #vulnerability in their CMS, just in time!,” CyberZeist said in a recent tweet.

IANS

Bangladesh sends a team to Philippines to speed up the recovery of funds stolen in SWIFT hack

Image: Reuters

  25 Nov 2016 , 10:17

A Bangladesh delegation will visit the Philippines to speed up recovery of the rest of some $81 million stolen from its account in the New York Federal Reserve in February, two officials said on Thursday, after recovering a fifth of the funds.

The five-member team, led by Law Minister Anisul Haq, will hold talks with Philippines authorities on Nov. 28 to Dec. 1. “We are hoping it will help expedite the recovery of the rest of stolen funds,” a member of the team told Reuters, on condition of anonymity. Unknown cyber criminals used stolen Bangladesh Bank credentials to try to transfer nearly $1 billion from its Fed account in early February, one of the biggest bank frauds ever.

They succeeded in transferring some $81 million via an account at the New York Federal Reserve to four accounts in fake names at a branch of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp in Manila. Most of the money was laundered through casinos in Manila and remains missing. Only $15.25 million has been recovered. It was returned to Bangladesh earlier this month.

A senior central bank official told Reuters the team will also try to meet Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had earlier pledged the stolen money would be returned. The team also included Bangladesh Bank Governor Fazle Kabir; Attorney General Mahbubey Alam; Abdur Razzaq, the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on the finance ministry; and Eunusur Rahman, secretary of the Finance Ministry’s bank and financial institutions division.

This week, an anti-money laundering body in the Philippines filed charges against five officials of RCBC bank and a former treasurer who “wilfully ignored” suspicious activity that led to the money vanishing after the cyber theft. No arrests have been made, despite investigations by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interpol, Bangladesh police and authorities in the Philippines.

Reuters

US boosting cyber defenses, but not police presence, for election

Representational

  04 Nov 2016 , 18:35

Federal and state authorities are beefing up cyber defenses against potential electronic attacks on voting systems ahead of US elections on 8 Nov, but taking few new steps to guard against possible civil unrest or violence.

The threat of computer hacking and the potential for violent clashes is darkening an already rancorous presidential race between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, amid fears that Russia or other actors could spread political misinformation online or perhaps tamper with voting.

To counter the cyber threat, all but two US states have accepted help from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to probe and scan voter registration and election systems for vulnerabilities, a department official told Reuters.

Ohio has asked a cyber protection unit of the National Guard, a reserve force within the US military, for assistance to protect the state’s systems.

On Thursday, Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan and her cyber security team met with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the DHS, in addition to state-level agencies, to discuss cyber threats, said Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Reagan.

Cyber security experts and US officials say chances that a hack could alter election outcomes are remote, in part because voting machines are typically not connected to the internet.

But the FBI sent a flash alert in August to states after detecting breaches in voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois.

ARMED GROUPS

Unidentified intelligence officials told NBC News on Thursday that there is no specific warning about an Election Day attack, but they remain concerned that hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to disrupt the process, likely by spreading misinformation by manipulating social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

DHS cyber security experts plan to hold a media briefing on Friday to discuss the agency’s efforts with states to boost the security of their voting and election systems.

The potential for violence around the election has loomed in the background of the campaign for months. Armed groups around the country have pledged in unprecedented numbers to monitor voting sites for signs of election fraud.

Voter intimidation reported at polling sites so far prompted Democrats to accuse Trump of a “campaign of vigilante voter intimidation” in four states on Monday.

But local authorities surveyed by Reuters on Thursday in five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Florida – said they were not increasing election-related law enforcement personnel or resources above 2012 levels.

‘A LOT OF TALK, LITTLE ACTION’

The FBI, which designates one special agent from each of its 56 field offices for election crime matters, has not increased its numbers or given staff additional training this year, said an FBI spokeswoman.

There has been no “substantive change” in the number of personnel deployed by the rest of the Justice Department, which designates Assistant US Attorneys and federal prosecutors within the agency’s Public Integrity Section to handle election crimes, according to a spokesman.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents hundreds of thousands of US officers, said cops are taking the same security measures they would take for any large event. He said he expects the vows by militias to monitor the polls to be “a lot of talk, little action.”

Civil rights groups said deploying more police officers to the polls can actually intimidate voters.

“The presence of law enforcement can have a chilling effect on the electorate,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a watchdog group. “That’s something we want to discourage.”

Reuters