With a flourish of a pen Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom blocked police in California from using facial recognition technology in their body cameras. The Body Camera Accountability Act bans the use of facial recognition technology in body cams for three years. It prohibits “a law enforcement agency or law enforcement officer from installing, activating or…
Several members-only dark web forums are reportedly auctioning what appears to be a stolen government database featuring the personal information of 92 million Brazilian citizens. The 16GB SQL database contains such information as name, birth date, mother’s name, gender and tax details including taxpayer IDs, according to BleepingComputer, which credits the discovery to a researcher…
A threat group, dubbed Phosphorus, that Microsoft believes to be linked to Iran’s government targeted email accounts associated with a presidential campaign as well as government officials, journalists and prominent Iranians living outside the country. “In a 30-day period between August and September, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) observed Phosphorus making more than 2,700…
The FBI yesterday issued a new public service announcement regarding the ongoing ransomware epidemic, emphasizing that attacks are becoming more targeted since early 2018, with losses increasingly significantly in that time. The alert is intended to update and supplement a previous ransomware warning that the FBI issued back in September 2016, and specifically identifies state…
The day after the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the National Security Archive and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations asked a federal judge in Washington to issue a restraining order compelling the White House to preserve records of communications with foreign leaders, including the call between President Trump and Ukraine President…
The U.S. Senate last week passed a bill requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain cyber hunt and incident response teams, while the House passed one that instructs DHS to share protocols for mitigating cyber vulnerabilities. The Senate bill, S.315, aka the DHS Cyber Hunt and Incident Response Teams Act of 2019, passed by…
A whistleblower complaint, declassified and released just minutes before the acting Director of National intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire is to testify before a congressional committee, alleged, among other things, that senior White House officials obfuscated communications between the president and the president of Ukraine by moving records of the call to a separate computer network…
For the second time since 2017, the third-party government bill-payment portal Click2Gov has experienced a significant data breach affecting thousands of individuals in multiple cities across the U.S. Government entities use the Click2Gov portal to accept payments for permits, licenses, fines and utilities. Discovered by fraud intelligence experts at Gemini Advisory, this latest attack compromised…
In conjunction with National Insider Threat Awareness month, the Defense Department has launched a counter-insider threat program aimed at educating its analysts on how to spot potential threats and suspicious behavior. “What we are trying to do is tell people if you hear that, if you see that, if you sense that, pay attention to…
Foreign actors have perpetrated the “persistent, pervasive, and coordinated online targeting” of American veterans, members of the military and their families for identity theft and influencing them via social media, even trying to sway their votes in the 2020 election with fake accounts like “Vets for Trump,” according to a report by the Vietnam Veterans…
