Tag: cyber security
 Laura Loomer

'Real Power': Trumpist Kook Laura Loomer Lights A Five-Alarm Fire

President Donald Trump’s abrupt apparent removal of the general who oversaw U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at the reported behest of the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a notorious bigot and conspiracy theorist, is a five-alarm fire for national security and good governance. The move demonstrates that the only qualification for service in the administration is personal loyalty to the president as determined by his most zealous sycophants.

Top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees said on Thursday night that Gen. Timothy D. Haugh had been removed from his positions as director of the NSA and head of the military’s Cyber Command. According to The New York Times, “a U.S. official briefed on the matter said Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and outside adviser to President Trump, called for General Haugh’s removal during her Oval Office meeting on Thursday. Mr. Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire General Haugh, the official said.”

Loomer subsequently appeared to take credit, writing on X that Haugh and his deputy had been “fired” because they were “disloyal to President Trump” and thanking the president “for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you.” She gave no evidence of Haugh’s purported disloyalty in her post — nor any critique of his service in his positions — instead criticizing him as “a Biden appointee” who “had no place serving in the Trump admin given the fact that he was HAND PICKED by” former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Haugh is not the only apparent casualty of Loomer’s efforts. His seeming removal comes amid a firestorm caused by the revelation that Hegseth had provided precise details about an imminent U.S. military strike in Yemen in a Signal messaging group of top Trump officials assembled by national security adviser Mike Waltz, a move experts said endangered the lives of U.S. service members.

Waltz and Hegseth still remain in their posts — but as that story continued to metastasize, Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office and provided him “with opposition research on [National Security Council] staffers whom she views as neoconservatives or not sufficiently loyal to the president.” The White House purged at least six NSC staffers following that meeting.

Trump surrounds himself with and takes counsel from a litany of right-wing media figures because he appreciates their fervent public support, particularly though not exclusively on Fox News. Those individuals wield immense power over every aspect of governance despite their total lack of relevant qualifications or temperament.

Even among the MAGA movement’s constellation of grifters, con artists, bigots, and loons, Loomer shines brightly. Here’s what I wrote about her in September as her presence accompanying Trump on the campaign trail triggered concern even from some of his other close allies:

Loomer is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who is “pro-white nationalism.” She has claimed there is a “genocide” of “native white populations,” which she says are “being replaced in this country by third-world invaders,” and accused “so many rich Jews” of having “a fixation on trying to destroy America.” She has accused the Biden administration of seeking to assassinate Trump; called for the execution of unnamed “Democrats who are guilty of treason”; said that “all of these communist secretaries of state who try to rig our elections” against Trump “belong in jail for election interference”; and shared a video which claimed “9/11 was an Inside Job!”
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Loomer has in recent weeks described [then-Vice President Kamala] Harris, whose parents immigrated from India and Jamaica, as “a brain-dead bimbo who sucked so much c**k in order to get to the political position that she's in today,” said she “is NOT black and never has been,” said her election would ensure that “Ebonics will replace English as the language of our land,” and said that if she’s elected “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”

Loomer is nonetheless unusually influential because Trump apparently appreciates her personal, fanatical loyalty. “I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post last year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”

She apparently has something now — enough influence to impose her own loyalty tests on high-ranking government officials and see them cashiered by the president (and, she claims, to help shape his foreign policy). And so the country turns on the whims of someone once described by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself no stranger to bigoted and unhinged conspiracy theories, as “mentally unstable and a documented liar” who “can not be trusted” and is “toxic and poisonous.”

If you had said in October that if Trump were elected he would end up firing the NSA director and purging the NSC on the advice of someone like Loomer, you’d have been accused of having a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, careening up to worst-case scenarios before the president’s 100-day mark.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

McConnell And Trump: Democracy’s Enemies Within

McConnell And Trump: Democracy’s Enemies Within

Among the most disturbing moments during the last presidential election cycle occurred in September 2016, when a group of top intelligence officials briefed congressional leaders on the Kremlin’s aggressive hacking campaign.

Aiming for bipartisan unity against a threat from a hostile foreign power, then-President Obama sent his counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to a secret meeting on Capitol Hill with the “Gang of 12” — leaders of both parties in the House and Senate plus the chairs and ranking members of the homeland security and intelligence committees. They asked the congressional leaders to join together and urge state and local election officials to protect the vote from Russian hacking with the assistance of federal authorities.

Patriotic instinct might have motivated most of the leaders to cooperate. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell objected, vehemently, to any such pushback against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agents. Not only did he question the intelligence community’s findings about Russian interference but he also warned that he considered any such public rebuke of Moscow a partisan attempt by the White House to turn the election.

Obama backed down, which proved to be a historic blunder. And McConnell got a Republican president and a Cabinet position for his wife, Trump’s transportation secretary, Elaine Chao — who has used that position to enrich her family of Chinese shipping magnates.

Although there was plenty of evidence by September 2016 that the Russians were seeking to interfere in our election on behalf of their preferred candidate Trump, McConnell seized on lingering doubts to conceal from voters what intelligence officials knew. He has no such excuses now, after the Mueller report and many previous reports have dispelled any doubt about Putin’s active measures.

Indeed, we now know that their intelligence services penetrated deeply into state election networks. While there is no evidence that those hacks changed any votes, it is entirely possible that the Russians will attempt to do so next time — and may well possess the capability.

And yet, the Republican leader still refuses to take action to protect our elections from the next assault by the Russians, in 2020. He has repeatedly blocked bipartisan bills that seek to enhance election security from reaching the Senate floor. In fact, McConnell has killed at least three such bills within the past few months.

First he knocked off the Secure Elections Act, sponsored by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and James Lankford (R-OK), which would empower the Department of Homeland Security to oversee and coordinate national efforts to counter any foreign entities’ attempts to interfere in U.S. elections; and fund improved cybersecurity programs for state and local election authorities. According to Klobuchar, McConnell and the White House stopped that legislation in a joint effort.

Then the Senate leader and the Trump gang teamed up against a pair of bipartisan bills approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by the president’s obsequious pal Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Like the Secure Elections Act, those bills would have sought to deter outside incursions into U.S. elections — and would have made hacking into a state voting system a federal crime.

McConnell worked in tandem with the Trump White House to stall this vital legislation before the 2020 election, presumably to save the president any embarrassment over vetoing it. Neither McConnell nor Trump has stated their exact objections to protecting our election systems. (Someone should ask Putin directly.)

When Robert Mueller spoke publicly about the findings of his investigation as he resigned from the Justice Department, he warned that all Americans should concern themselves with the Russians’ 2016 attack — obviously because it will happen again. Security and intelligence officials across the country have uttered that same warning, more than once. And both the Republican Senate majority and the White House have stymied any action to protect the integrity of our democracy.

Perhaps we should turn our attention now to the enemies within.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

 

Learn How To Hack And Secure IT Systems – For Under $50

Learn How To Hack And Secure IT Systems – For Under $50

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeWith news breaking all the time about the latest cyber security breaches to compromise business, personal, and even government systems both big and small, it’s easy to get the impression that IT security is a purely defensive game. However, the best ethical hackers play plenty of offense as well, using a forward-thinking approach to identify threats and neutralize them before they become major threats.

You can join the international effort to secure the web from cyber-terrorism with the training of the Super-Sized Ethical Hacking course bundle, on sale right now for just $43 (over 90 percent off) from The National Memo Store.

This package may seem intimidating at first, packing in over 78 hours of instruction across nine mammoth courses, but once you jump in, even as a pure IT security novice, you’ll quickly understand the terms, tools and methods you’ll need to become a full-service ethical hacker.

After working your way through the introductory courses (Ethical Hacking From Scratch to Advanced Techniques, Learn Social Engineering From Scratch, Complete WiFi and Network Ethical Hacking Course 2017 and Cyber Security Volume I: Hackers Exposed), you’ll be ready to move up to more complex operations to help better identify external threats, beat them back, and refortify your security to make sure similar vulnerabilities don’t happen again.

From there, you’ll move on to actual hands on work using the most powerful pentesting tools in a hacker’s arsenal (Ethical Hacking Using Kali Linux From A to Z, Learn Website Hacking and Penetration Testing From Scratch and Hands on, Interactive Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking). You’ll also work on the knowledge you need to ace the industry-recognized CompTIA certification exam (CompTIA Security + Exam Preparation). This training is even thinking about your bottom line, with ways to get in and start making money immediately with your newfound skills (Bug Bounty: Web Hacking).

The IT security ranks swell every day and you can be a part of that surge with comprehensive training for a limited time – at more than 90 percent off, to boot!

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce. 

5 Reasons You Need A VPN When You Travel — and Why You Should Use Disconnect

5 Reasons You Need A VPN When You Travel — and Why You Should Use Disconnect

The message has become so battle-worn that you can probably nearly recite it in your sleep — a virtual private network (VPN) is essential to your security on the web. But after hearing the constant drumbeat of advocates for so many years now, there may be plenty of relatively novice web users who don’t fully understand what a VPN does or how it can serve as a vital line of defense for you, your digital systems, and your precious information.

For those in the know, you can cut right to the chase and get a year of protection from one of the most highly-regarded VPN services on the market — Disconnect — for a ridiculously low $19 (over 60 percent off) from The National Memo Store.

However, for those a bit fuzzier on exactly what a VPN offers and how, we’ve broken down five very simple ways a VPN is an essential travel partner literally anywhere you go.

1. Public WiFi is sketchy… and a VPN is your bulletproof vest.

Sure, we all love public WiFi. Nobody wants to use their oh-so-precious cellular minutes while they’re strolling through the mall if that mall is kind enough to offer free public WiFi for its customers. But hold on… just because the mall wants to give you something nice and do you a solid, that attitude is not necessarily held by everyone using that public hub. In fact, crooks routinely stake out those hubs, preying on devices that log in, leaving their personal information vulnerable to theft.

Not so with a VPN. Disconnect allows you to use the WiFi to connect, yet provides encryption via its own iron-clad connection shielding in any location anywhere. Behind that level of security, hackers and cyberthieves can’t crack your defenses and attack your data and files.

2. Some countries aren’t fans of a free information exchange.

If you remember back when you could roam freely almost anywhere on the web and see it all… well, that was a long time ago. Nowadays, some countries take a very heavy-handed approach to what citizens and visitors can see on the internet, blocking many popular news sites, social media platforms, and search engines to restrict the flow of information.

With a VPN like Disconnect, those restrictions fall away. You can elect to connect to a server outside the country you’re in, instantly getting you around any particular country’s arbitrary web bans.

3. Did we mention watching whatever you want whenever you want?

Sometimes, international content providers can seem just as authoritarian as rigid governments. Many companies who own worldwide distribution rights to your favorite films, television series and music will even go so far as to control it by national boundaries, geo-locking their product around the world.  That means if you want to log into your American Netflix account and watch movies while you’re on vacation in Europe… no dice.

Instead, fire up your VPN and you can decide which of your provider’s servers to log into, meaning you can either connect locally to surf the web (and watch content) like other locals; or choose a server in another country, cloaking you to look like you’re physically located anywhere you want — and subject only to those rules.

4. If no one can see you, no one can hurt you.

Anonymity is the best defense. Remember those hackers and cyberthieves? Behind the veil of total privacy provided by VPNs like Disconnect, you can go anywhere on the web, do anything and leave no trail of those activities. Thieves can’t steal what they can’t find, and if your VPN provider makes you the equivalent of an internet ghost, malicious forces can’t target your vital financial and personal information for attack.

Foreign agencies and government watchdogs? Nope, they can’t see you either. Even nosy friends, family and other associates will never know what you’ve been doing online.

5. Speed up your web connection overnight.

You may wonder if funneling your internet connection through a VPN’s secure encryption tunnel will slow your roll online. And in some cases, it can. However, in addition to its other VPN advantages, Disconnect is also a malware and web tracking blocker. Where standard internet connections can leave you vulnerable to those cookies following you all over the web and bogging down your service, Disconnect sweeps those trackers and other unnecessary browser activities away. In fact, Disconnect will have you browsing up to 44% faster — and using almost 40% less bandwidth to do it.

In addition to Disconnect’s current 1-year deal for $19, you can also lock in their services to longer term, equally attractive rates, including a three-year plan for $29 and lifetime Disconnect protection for only $49.

This sponsored post is brought to you by StackCommerce.

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