Peter Warren Singer is an American political scientist, an international relations scholar and a specialist on 21st-century warfare. He is a New York Times bestselling author of both nonfiction and fiction, who has been described in The Wall Street Journal as "the premier futurist in the national-security environment".
Trellix is a privately held cybersecurity company that was founded in 2022. It has been involved in the detection and prevention of major cybersecurity attacks. It provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.
Cyberwarfare is the use of computer technology to disrupt the activities of a state or organization, especially the deliberate attacking of information systems for strategic or military purposes. As a major developed economy, the United States is highly dependent on the Internet and therefore greatly exposed to cyber attacks. At the same time, the United States has substantial capabilities in both defense and power projection thanks to comparatively advanced technology and a large military budget. Cyber warfare presents a growing threat to physical systems and infrastructures that are linked to the internet. Malicious hacking from domestic or foreign enemies remains a constant threat to the United States. In response to these growing threats, the United States has developed significant cyber capabilities.
Barrett Lancaster Brown is an American journalist, essayist, activist and former associate of Anonymous. In 2010, he founded Project PM, a group that used a wiki to analyze leaks concerning the military-industrial complex. It was classified a "criminal organization" by the Department of Justice. In late 2020, Brown restarted Project PM.
Exposed.su was a website run by Russian hackers focused on the listing of personal information of celebrities, and other high-profile figures. Among the high-profile victims include Michelle Obama, Donald Trump, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kim Kardashian, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Beyonce and Robert Mueller. The "doxed" documents, which are hosted on the website, include Social Security numbers, credit histories, loan documents and mortgage information of the individuals.
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas. It provides cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services. The company has been involved in investigations of several high-profile cyberattacks, including the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, the 2015–16 cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the 2016 email leak involving the DNC.
"Guccifer 2.0" is a persona which claimed to be the hacker(s) who gained unauthorized access to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network and then leaked its documents to the media, the website WikiLeaks, and a conference event. Some of the documents "Guccifer 2.0" released to the media appear to be forgeries cobbled together from public information and previous hacks, which had been mixed with disinformation. According to indictments in February 2018, the persona is operated by Russian military intelligence agency GRU. On July 13, 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU agents for allegedly perpetrating the cyberattacks.
The Equifax data breach occurred between May and July 2017 at the American credit bureau Equifax. Private records of 147.9 million Americans along with 15.2 million British citizens and about 19,000 Canadian citizens were compromised in the breach, making it one of the largest cybercrimes related to identity theft. In a settlement with the United States Federal Trade Commission, Equifax offered affected users settlement funds and free credit monitoring.
Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know is the sixteenth book by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, published in October 2018 by Oxford University Press. The book concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Dark Overlord is an international hacker organization which garnered significant publicity through cybercrime extortion of high-profile targets and public demands for ransom to prevent the release of confidential or potentially embarrassing documents.
Epik is an American domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to alt-tech websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist materials. It has been described as a "safehaven for the extreme right" because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.
Bugcrowd is a crowdsourced security platform. It was founded in 2012, and in 2019 it was one of the largest bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure companies on the internet. Bugcrowd runs bug bounty programs and also offers a range of penetration testing services it refers to as "Penetration Testing as a Service" (PTaaS), as well as attack surface management.
In 2020, a major cyberattack suspected to have been committed by a group backed by the Russian government penetrated thousands of organizations globally including multiple parts of the United States federal government, leading to a series of data breaches. The cyberattack and data breach were reported to be among the worst cyber-espionage incidents ever suffered by the U.S., due to the sensitivity and high profile of the targets and the long duration in which the hackers had access. Within days of its discovery, at least 200 organizations around the world had been reported to be affected by the attack, and some of these may also have suffered data breaches. Affected organizations worldwide included NATO, the U.K. government, the European Parliament, Microsoft and others.
Sakura Samurai was a white hat hacking and security research group that was founded in 2020. The group is responsible for multiple vulnerability disclosures involving governmental groups and various corporations.
Higinio Ochoa, also known as w0rmer, is an American hacker. In 2012, while associated with the hacker group CabinCr3w, he was arrested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and ultimately served two years in federal prison for hacking. As of 2021, Ochoa is a member of the white-hat hacker group Sakura Samurai.
The Epik data breach occurred in September and October 2021, targeting the American domain registrar and web hosting company Epik. The breach exposed a wide range of information including personal information of customers, domain history and purchase records, credit card information, internal company emails, and records from the company's WHOIS privacy service. More than 15 million unique email addresses were exposed, belonging to customers and to non-customers whose information had been scraped. The attackers responsible for the breach identified themselves as members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. The attackers released an initial 180 gigabyte dataset on September 13, 2021, though the data appeared to have been exfiltrated in late February of the same year. A second release, this time containing bootable disk images, was made on September 29. A third release on October 4 reportedly contained more bootable disk images and documents belonging to the Texas Republican Party, a customer of Epik's.
Aubrey Cottle, also known as Kirtaner or Kirt, is a Canadian website forum administrator who claims to be an FBI informant and early member of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Cottle was involved with Anonymous during the late 2000s and in its resurgence beginning in 2020, in which the group attempted to combat the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon.
John Jackson also known as Mr. Hacking, is an American security researcher and founder of the white-hat hacking group Sakura Samurai.
