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Pro-Russian hackers launched a series of denial-of-service attacks Monday on several municipalities and organisations linked to a NATO summit this week in the Netherlands, the Dutch government announced. The National Cybersecurity Center said in a statement that many of the attacks were claimed by a pro-Russian hackers' group known as NoName057(16) and appear to have a pro-Russian ideological motive. It did not elaborate. The cybersecurity centre said it was investigating the attacks that flood a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline, and was in contact with national and international partners. Raoul Rozestraten, a spokesman for the municipality in The Hague, the Dutch city hosting the summit Tuesday and Wednesday, said the attacks hit municipalities around the country. We noticed more traffic on the website of some of our service providers, he told The Associated Press. As of now, everything in The Hague is working normally." The government had launched a m
Hackers with possible links to Israel have drained more than USD 90 million from Nobitex, Iran's largest cryptocurrency exchange, according to blockchain analytics firms. The group that claimed responsibility for the hack leaked on Thursday what it said was the company's full source code. ASSETS LEFT IN NOBITEX ARE NOW ENTIRELY OUT IN THE OPEN, the group wrote on its Telegram account. The stolen funds were transferred to addresses bearing messages that criticised Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic wrote in a blog post. It said the attack likely was not financially motivated as the wallets the hackers had poured the money into effectively burned the funds in order to send Nobitex a political message. The hackers group, Gonjeshke Darande Predatory Sparrow in Farsi accused Nobitex of having helped Iran's government to evade Western sanctions over the country's rapidly advancing nuclear programme and transfer money to militants, in a post on X claiming the
Cybersecurity investigators noticed a highly unusual software crash it was affecting a small number of smartphones belonging to people who worked in government, politics, tech and journalism. The crashes, which began late last year and carried into 2025, were the tipoff to a sophisticated cyberattack that may have allowed hackers to infiltrate a phone without a single click from the user. The attackers left no clues about their identities, but investigators at the cybersecurity firm iVerify noticed that the victims all had something in common: They worked in fields of interest to China's government and had been targeted by Chinese hackers in the past. Foreign hackers have increasingly identified smartphones, other mobile devices and the apps they use as a weak link in US cyberdefences. Groups linked to China's military and intelligence service have targeted the smartphones of prominent Americans and burrowed deep into telecommunication networks, according to national security and .
China issued warrants on Thursday for 20 Taiwanese people it said carried out hacking missions in the Chinese mainland on behalf of the island's ruling party, while separately banning dealings with a Taiwanese company whose owners mainland authorities called hardcore Taiwan independence supporters". Police in the southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou said they were led by a man named Ning Enwei on behalf of Taiwan's independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party but did not identify their alleged crimes. Meanwhile, China's government said all commercial contact had been banned with the Sicuens International Company Ltd., which it says are led by businessman Puma Shen and his father, calling the two men independence supports. Websites mentioning Sicuens say it specializes in sourcing bicycle parts from China. Shen is also the head of the Kuma Academy, an organization that encourages Taiwanese people to prepare for possible invasion. China considers Taiwan its own territory, to
The 2016 presidential campaign was entering its final months and seemingly all of Washington was abuzz with talk about how Russian hackers had penetrated the email accounts of Democrats, triggering the release of internal communications that seemed designed to boost Donald Trump's campaign and hurt Hillary Clinton's. Yet there was a notable exception: The officials investigating the hacks were silent. When they finally issued a statement, one month before the election, it was just three paragraphs and did little more than confirm what had been publicly suspected that there had been a brazen Russian effort to interfere in the vote. This year, there was another foreign hack, but the response was decidedly different. US security officials acted more swiftly to name the culprit, detailing their findings and blaming a foreign adversary this time, Iran just over a week after Trump's campaign revealed the attack. They accused Iranian hackers of targeting the presidential campaigns of b
The same Iranian hacking group believed to have targeted both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, tried to go after the WhatsApp accounts of staffers in the administrations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Meta Platforms said Friday. Meta said it discovered the network of hackers, who posed as tech support agents for companies including Microsoft and Google, after individuals who received the suspicious WhatsApp messages reported them. Meta's investigators linked the activity to the same network blamed for the hacking incident reported by Trump's campaign. The FBI this week said a hack by Iran of the Trump campaign and an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign was part of a broader Iranian effort to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. A statement Friday from Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, said that the hackers had tried to target the WhatsApp account of individuals in the Middle East, the United States and the