NEW REPORTING CONFIRMS what previous stories speculated: chief of staff John Kelly's phone was hacked, and now they know where. They still don't know by whom, or how, or why, or what the damage was. Read the rest

A security breach affected the MyHeritage website, and leaked the personal information of over 92 million users, the Israeli company said Tuesday. Read the rest

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

The FBI sent out an urgent bulletin advising anyone with a home or small office internet router to immediately turn it off and then turn it on again as a way to help stop the spread of a malware outbreak with origins in Russia. Read the rest

A Canadian man born in Kazakhstan has been sentenced to five years in prison for crimes connected to the massive Yahoo security breach that U.S. federal agents say was directed by Russian government spies.

“Karim Baratov, an FSB go-to guy for webmail hacking, was sentenced to 5 years in prison this morning, less than the nearly 8 years sought by the Justice Department,” says Daily Beast's Kevin Poulsen.

Below, why 5 years in prison is actually a good outcome for Baratov, who is 23. Read the rest

The United States and Britain today accused Russia of launching a new wave of internet-based attacks targeting routers, firewalls and other computer networking equipment used by government agencies, businesses and critical infrastructure operators around the globe. Read the rest

Surprise! The hacker who delivered all those stolen Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks turns out to be a Russian intel officer.

The Daily Beast has the story:

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.

While it’s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy “for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.” It was Mueller’s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime.

Mueller’s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold—and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.

“Making you angry, making you afraid, is really good for Facebook's business. It is not good for America.” Read the rest

Former National Security Agency employee Nghia H. Pho said in a Baltimore courtroom today he'd illegally taken home classified documents from NSA that are understood to have later “been stolen from his home computer by hackers working for Russian intelligence,” the NYT reports.

Nghia H. Pho, 67, of Ellicott City, Md., pleaded guilty to one count of removal and retention of national defense information, an offense that carries a possible 10-year sentence. Prosecutors agreed not to seek more than eight years, however, and Mr. Pho’s attorney, Robert Bonsib, will be free to ask for a more lenient sentence. He remains free while awaiting sentencing.

Mr. Pho had been charged in secret, though some news reports had given a limited description of the case. Officials unsealed the charges on Friday, resolving the long-running mystery of the defendant’s identity.

Mr. Pho, who worked as a software developer for N.S.A., was born in Vietnam but is a naturalized United States citizen. Prosecutors withheld from the public many details of his government work and of the criminal case against him, which is linked to a continuing investigation of Russian hacking.

1977's Apple ][+ was the first successful personal computer, inspiring a generation of hackers and makers and coders; famously, it shipped with a schematic that showed how the boards and their components worked together, to allow hobbyists to improve and service their PCs (hardware-hacking legend Bunnie Huang credits these schematics with igniting his interest in electronics and computing). Read the rest

Big Four accounting firm Deloitte, with $37B in annual revenues, found out that it had been hacked in March, and the hackers appear to have been inside its systems (supplied by Microsoft through its Azure cloud) since the previous October or March. Read the rest

The Department of Homeland Security today revealed which states were targeted by Russian hackers trying to break into voting systems during the 2016 election cycle. DHS said "most" states were unsuccessfully attacked, but didn't make clear how and where the hackers were successful, or whether the sustained cyberattacks helped Donald Trump win the presidency. Read the rest

The head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said this week that hackers accessed the SEC's corporate disclosure database and likely profited by trading on that stolen insider information. Read the rest

CCleaner is a clean-your-computer app beloved of people who own inexplicably slow PCs. If you installed recent editions of it, you were installing malware. But the company behind it hasn't gone rogue, reports Reuters. Hackers compromised their systems.

A version of CCleaner downloaded in August included remote administration tools that tried to connect to several unregistered web pages, presumably to download additional unauthorized programs, security researchers at Cisco’s (CSCO.O) Talos unit said.

Talos researcher Craig Williams said it was a sophisticated attack because it penetrated an established and trusted supplier in a manner similar to June’s “NotPetya” attack on companies that downloaded infected Ukrainian accounting software.

“There is nothing a user could have noticed,” Williams said, noting that the optimization software had a proper digital certificate, which means that other computers automatically trust the program.

The infected version is 5.33, and you likely have it if you installed the Windows version of CCleaner between August 15 and September 13. That's 2.3 million installs, admits Avast.

CCleaner's owner, Avast-owned Piriform, has sought to ease concerns. Paul Yung, vice president of product at Piriform, wrote in a post Monday: "Based on further analysis, we found that the 5.33.6162 version of CCleaner and the 1.07.3191 version of CCleaner Cloud was illegally modified before it was released to the public, and we started an investigation process.

"The threat has now been resolved in the sense that the rogue server is down, other potential servers are out of the control of the attacker.

"Users of CCleaner Cloud version 1.07.3191 have received an automatic update.

A rare joint alert from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation explicitly blames the government of North Korea for a series of hacking attacks on various American targets, dating as far back as 2009. The government alert warns that more such ”state-sponsored cyberattacks,” as they're known in security jargon, are likely to come. Read the rest

Crosby, Stills & Nash recorded this theme song for War Games, the seminal hacker film of 1983. The tune was heard in movie trailers and in this promotional video that aired on MTV but was apparently pulled from the film. The song, "War Games," was included on the band's album Allies. From the lyrics:

I am not so sure What you want me for Either your machine Is a fool, or me

Now there is no time to wait No time to think it over Take the path, believe the math You'll tell me when it's over

Read the rest

Ned Desmond shares the scary story of how a small site he managed that advertised fishing expeditions ended up with 565,192 scam pages. He also suggests five ways to avoid the same fate. Read the rest

'President' Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order addressing cybersecurity today, Reuters reports in an item that cites "two sources familiar with the situation.” The EO is expected to be Trump's first action to address what he called a top priority of his administration during the Presidential campaign. Read the rest