Category Archives: FBI

Immigrants Buying Entry into U.S., are Some Terrorists?

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…..even if they are corrupt and the money used has been laundered or financed by a terror organization…

Primer:

CIA Director: We ‘have to assume’ terrorist activity in US

‘Impossible to say’ if ISIS has cells here

(CNN) – The director of the CIA said Wednesday despite the government’s best efforts, the likelihood of terrorist activity in the United States is strong.

“So I think we have to assume there’s something here in the states,” said John Brennan, in an interview for CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that aired Wednesday night. “We have to be relentless in terms of going after them.”

Brennan, who was appointed to lead the CIA shortly before President Barack Obama’s second term, said “it’s impossible to say” whether ISIS has operatives or cells in the United States, and he credited the “tremendous advances in information sharing and interaction between federal officials” in making it difficult for terrorists to operate in the country.

He said he is confident that the US will be “able to remove other senior members” of ISIS, including the organization’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“His time is limited,” Brennan said of al-Baghdadi. “It’s just a question of whether or not he is going to be removed this week, this month, next month or in the coming months.”

But still, Brennan said “you cannot assume there’s nobody in the homeland.”

“What you need to do is to be able to continue to uncover and use intelligence, what they might be doing here,” he said. More details here.

Immigrant Investor Program:

Progress Made to Detect and Prevent Fraud, but Additional Actions Could Further Agency Efforts

What GAO Found   Full report here.

Inspector General Report is here.

The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has recently taken steps intended to enhance fraud detection and mitigation activities for the Employment-Based Fifth Preference Immigrant Investor Program (EB-5 Program) and address previous GAO recommendations.

This includes actions such as conducting and planning additional risk assessments to gather additional information on potential fraud risks to the program. For example, USCIS is leveraging overseas staff to investigate potential fraud associated with unlawful sources of immigrant investor funds and is conducting a site visit pilot to help assess the potential risks of fraud among EB-5 program investments. USCIS is also taking steps to collect more information about EB-5 program investments and immigrant investors through new, revised forms and expanding its use of background checks, among other things, to help improve its ability to identify specific incidence of fraud. However, fraud mitigation in the EB-5 Program is hindered by a reliance on voluminous paper files, which limit the agency’s ability to collect and analyze program information. In its review of a nongeneralizable selection of files associated with EB-5 program regional centers and immigrant investors, GAO found that identifying fraud indicators is extremely challenging. For example, many of these files were several thousand pages long and would take significant time to review. According to USCIS documentation, the program anticipates receiving approximately 14 million pages of supporting documentation from its regional-center applicants and immigrant investor petitioners annually. Recognizing these limitations, USCIS has taken preliminary steps to study digitizing and analyzing the paper files submitted by petitioners and applicants to the program, which could help USCIS better identify fraud indicators in the program; however, these efforts are in the early stages.

USCIS has incorporated selected leading fraud risk management practices into its efforts but could take additional actions to help guide and document its efforts. GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework is a set of leading practices that can serve as a guide for program managers to use when developing efforts to combat fraud in a strategic, risk-based manner. USCIS’s actions align with two key components of the Fraud Risk Framework: (1) commit to combating fraud by creating an organizational culture and structure conducive to fraud risk management such as by providing specialized fraud awareness training; and (2) assess risks by planning and completing regular fraud risk assessments. However, USCIS has not developed a fraud risk profile, an overarching document that guides its fraud management efforts, as called for in the Fraud Risk Framework. Instead, USCIS’s risk assessments, spanning multiple years, were developed as separate documents and reports, and there is not a unifying document that consolidates and systematically prioritizes these findings. Without a fraud risk profile, USCIS may not be well positioned to identify and prioritize fraud risks in the EB-5 Program, ensure the appropriate controls are in place to mitigate fraud risks, and implement other Fraud Risk Framework components.

Why GAO Did This Study

Congress created the EB-5 visa category to promote job creation and capital investment by immigrant investors in exchange for lawful permanent residency and a path to citizenship. Participants must invest either $500,000 or $1 million in a business that is to create at least 10 jobs. Upon meeting program requirements, immigrant investors are eligible for conditional status to live and work in the United States and can apply to remove the conditional basis of lawful permanent residency after 2 years. In August 2015, GAO reported on weaknesses in certain USCIS fraud mitigation activities, and made two related recommendations.

GAO was asked to review actions taken by USCIS to address fraud risks in the EB-5 program since its August 2015 report. This report examines the extent to which USCIS (1) has taken steps to enhance its fraud detection and mitigation efforts; and (2) has incorporated selected leading fraud risk management practices into its efforts. GAO reviewed relevant program documentation and information; selected and reviewed a random, nongeneralizable sample of immigrant investor petitions and regional-center applications submitted between fiscal years 2010 and 2014; and compared USCIS’s actions against GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework.

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends that USCIS develop a fraud risk profile that aligns with leading practices identified in GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with GAO’s recommendation.

DHS Allows Refugees into U.S. with only Testimony, no Documents

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Europe, now then the United States…

Related reading: Presidential Determination Signed to Accept 85,000 Refugees

VIDEO: Obama Administration Official Admits to Allowing Refugees in to U.S. Based on Their Testimony Alone

Cruz questions administration officials on refugee program at Judiciary Committee hearing

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in today’s Judiciary immigration subcommittee hearing, highlighted serious problems with the Obama administration’s refugee resettlement efforts, including the federal government’s inadequate refugee vetting process. While questioning State Department Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Simon Henshaw, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Director León Rodríguez, and Department of Health and Human Services Director Robert Carey, Sen. Cruz specifically noted that the administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism has prevented Christian refugees from the Middle East from escaping the genocide of ISIS and has also seriously undermined counterterrorism efforts in the United States.

Moreover, during an exchange with Sen. Cruz, Director Rodríguez acknowledged publicly that refugee applications can be approved based solely on the applicant’s testimony, without any documentation.

Sen. Cruz: Is it true or false that the testimony of the applicant alone can be sufficient for approval? 

Director Rodríguez: There are cases where the testimony is not necessarily corroborated by documents…I am acknowledging that, yes, testimony can be the basis for the grant of a refugee…

Watch Sen. Cruz’s full opening remarks and first line of questioning, where Director Rodríguez admits that refugee applications can be approved based on testimony alone, here. Sen. Cruz’s second line of questioning can be viewed here. Below is the full transcript of Sen. Cruz’s opening remarks:

“America has long shown an incredible generosity of spirit welcoming refugees and offering them safe haven. Indeed, I am the son of a refugee who fled prison and torture in Cuba and came to America seeking freedom. But our immigration laws are not a suicide pact. The refugee program should not become a vehicle for terrorists to come murder innocent Americans.

“I and, I think, a great many Americans are deeply concerned by the willful blindness of this administration to the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. That was characterized powerfully just a few minutes ago when our Democratic colleague Senator Al Franken said we should not even ask refugees if they are Muslims. If one is trying to prevent radical Islamic terrorists from coming in, the suggestion from my Democratic colleague that we shouldn’t even ask, to me, is nuts.

“As we look at what is happening in Syria and what is happening in the Middle East, ISIS is evil. They are waging a war of genocide against Christians. They are murdering Jews. They are murdering fellow Muslims, and yet, the refugee program as administered by this administration seems to have an enormous preference for Syrian Muslim refugees and seems to actively keep out Syrian Christian refugees.

“In 2014, the Obama administration admitted 249 refugees from Syria, 224 of those, 89.9 percent, were Muslim, only 13 were Christian – 5.2 percent. In 2015, the Obama administration admitted 2,192 refugees from Syria; 2,149 were Muslim – that’s 98 percent – and only 29, 1.3 percent, were Christian. In 2016 to date, the Obama administration has admitted 11,717 refugees from Syria, of those 11,624 were Muslim – that’s 99.2 percent – and 49 were Christian – that’s 0.41 percent. All told since 2011, 14,267 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States and more than 14,000 of them were Muslim. Fewer than 100 were Christian.

“Now, those numbers are not even close to the proportional population in Syria. Ten percent of the pre-war population in Syria was Christian, and yet, 0.68 percent of the refugees being admitted by the administration are Christian.”

Dept of Treasury, Judgement Fund and Obamacare, Ruh Roh

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That Judgment Fund is the same financial account out of which the United States paid Iran the ransom money of an estimated $1.7 Billion. By the way, the funds in this account are taxpayer dollars and not from other sources. So…..while Obamacare exchanges are going bankrupt, up to 11 so far, the other major health insurers are demanding the White House and Treasury make good on the contracts to pay them what they are owed. Looks as though….it will come out of this ‘judgment fund’ and the taxpayers are fleeced again.

As a matter of fact, the Department of Justice has to approve payments out of the Judgment Fund, with this transmittal form. If you can stand it, this page has many forms, procedures and requirements regarding monies in and out of the Judgment Fund.

Obama administration may use obscure fund to pay billions to ACA insurers

WashingtonPost: The Obama administration is maneuvering to pay billions of dollars the government owes to health insurers under the Affordable Care Act, potentially resorting to an obscure Treasury Department fund intended to cover federal legal claims.

Justice Department officials have told several health plans suing the government over the unpaid money that they are eager to negotiate a broad settlement, which would allow the administration to compensate about 170 other insurers selling coverage in ACA marketplaces, according to insurance executives and lawyers familiar with the talks.

The efforts in recent weeks reflect the partisan thorns that still surround the sprawling law six years after its passage. The payouts probably would be made from the Judgment Fund, a 1950s creation that is allowed as much money as it needs to satisfy valid claims against the government. Such a move would bypass congressional Republicans, who have criticized certain ACA provisions as industry “bailouts” and blocked the Health and Human Services Department from paying health plans what they are owed.

In the waning months of the Obama White House, administration officials are continuing their upbeat portrayal of all aspects of the health-care law, one of President Obama’s main domestic achievements. Behind the scenes, they think that settling these claims — $2.5 billion for 2014 and an as-yet-undisclosed sum for 2015 — is crucial to the exchanges’ well-being at a time when the high cost of covering ACA customers has driven some small insurers out of business and prompted several large ones to defect from marketplaces for the coming year.

“It’s a legacy item for the White House,” said Dan Mendelson, president of the health consulting firm Avalere and an adviser on the payout effort. “It’s more than just a lawsuit. It’s really about the future . . . and stability of these markets.”

Even with a settlement still uncertain, GOP lawmakers are beginning to cry foul. “It’s an end run on the clear . . . intent of Congress,” said Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (Va.).

The money in question involves one of three strategies to help coax insurers into the ACA marketplaces by promising to cushion them from unexpectedly high expenses for their new customers. This particular strategy, known as “risk corridors,” was for the marketplaces’ early years, when it was unclear how many people would sign up and how much medical care they would use.

The risk corridors started in 2014 and run through this December. The idea, patterned after a similar arrangement for health plans that sell Medicare drug benefits, is to balance out insurers’ costs by requiring those with unexpectedly low expenses to pay into a fund that would be used to compensate companies with unexpectedly high expenses. The program originally was not supposed to pay for itself, but two years ago the Republican-led Congress restricted HHS from using any of its other money for that purpose.

The crunch first became apparent last fall, when federal health officials announced that they could make less than $400 million in 2014 risk corridor payments — just 12.6 percent of $2.9 billion overall. About 175 insurers are owed money, according to an HHS list.

Health officials have not said how many insurers need to be paid for 2015, how much they are due or how much money is available. But in a five-paragraph memo this month, HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said that any available money will be put toward what the government still owes for the previous year.

The risk corridor payments are “an obligation of the federal government,” Andy Slavitt, CMS’s acting administrator, told a recent House hearing.

The shortfall has contributed to the collapse of more than half of the 23 nonprofit, consumer-oriented health plans created under the ACA. Four of those co-ops are among the seven insurers suing the government, the most recent this week.

CMS spokesman Aaron Albright referred questions to the Justice Department. Justice spokeswoman Nicole Navas declined to confirm the settlement talks because the litigation is pending.

One health plan executive, whose attorney has spoken with Justice officials, said the department is trying to reach an agreement with suing insurers in the next two weeks on what percentage of the remaining $2.5 billion would be paid out for 2014, as well as for a 2015 amount. At that point, the same offer would be made to every other insurer owed money. A judge would need to approve the arrangement, according to the executive, who spoke about the pending litigation on the condition of anonymity.

Treasury’s Judgment Fund would most likely be the source of the money, the executive and others involved said. The fund’s website shows that it has been used for a few hundred claims against HHS in the past decade. Taken together, they amounted to about $18 million — a fraction of what the insurers are owed.

News of the settlements talk Thursday morning prompted an immediate online debate, with some people condemning the potential use of Treasury’s fund for the payments and others wondering whether those should be guaranteed through the risk corridors’ third year as well.

Stephen Swedlow, a lawyer for Health Republic Insurance in Oregon, a co-op that was forced to close early this year, said he is preparing a settlement proposal to send to Justice. Said Health Republic chief executive Dawn Bonder: “I don’t think DOJ is making a secret that they would like [the lawsuits] to go away.”

Russia Hacked 4 Voter Registration Systems

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Russian Hackers Targeted Nearly Half of States’ Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrated 4

Think hackers will tip the vote? Read this first….

CSMonitor —The US election system is a massively complex tangle of technology. And some of it is insecure.

It’s rife with internet-based entry points, full of outdated infrastructure, cluttered with proprietary software from a random assortment of vendors, and lacks any standardized security safeguards.

In all, it’s a recipe for disaster. But if a malicious hacker really set out to manipulate the election, how would they actually do it and what could they really accomplish?

The most obvious target seems to be internet-enabled voting, currently used in 32 states. But, these systems aren’t what you think of when you hear “internet-enabled.”

They tend to be systems for distributing ballots that voters print out on paper, sign, and then email or fax back to the state authority for counting.

But emailing and faxing ballots introduces some problems. On a technical level, faxes and the emails used in internet voting aren’t encrypted.

That means states are passing ballots around the open internet. If an attacker is able to compromise any point along the way, they might intercept completed ballots.

Related reading: Hackers have attempted more intrusions into voter databases, FBI director says

So, not only does this system do away with any notion of secrecy, it also ignores any modern understanding of cryptographic security.

I’d much rather see online voting systems with built-in encryption. And that’s not a complex undertaking. Many websites currently use HTTPS, an encrypted protocol, to avoid leaking important things such as credit card numbers and passwords. That’s a good place to start for completed ballots.

Hard targets

But launching a full-scale attack on these systems wouldn’t be easy. First, attackers would need to target online voters (a small minority) who are scattered in various jurisdictions.

Then, once the vulnerable voters are identified, attackers would need to wait for the polling place to transmit those votes. While that kind of attack could work on one person, or a single location, it would be difficult to pull off at any meaningful scale.

Alternatively, an adversary could invent an entirely new population of phantom voters, register them to vote remotely, and stuff the ballot box with fake votes. That’s possible, but highly improbable.

So, what about servers

The easiest way to target servers that collect online ballots is with a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack that overwhelms a website with traffic. A totally compromised server could enable attackers to alter or destroy votes in a much sneakier way, and an attack like this could potentially avoid detection until after the election.

But this sort of attack would be pretty obvious to system maintainers, and I suspect polling administrators would quickly switch back to relying on the mail. Remember, online systems aren’t intended for use on Election Day, rather they merely collect absentee ballots.

On the bright side, however, this kind of attack appears possible for only five of the internet-enabled voting states. Only Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, North Dakota, and Missouri have a so-called internet portal.

And none of those states are battleground territories. So, regardless of their security posture, attacking these portals isn’t likely to sway the election. If Florida or Pennsylvania had one of these portals, I’d be more worried.

Voting machines

No electronic voting machine is bulletproof when it comes to cybersecurity. But if an adversary needs to physically visit voting machines in order to fiddle with results, then he or she would need a whole lot of bodies in a whole lot of polling places in order to make an impact.

Don’t get me wrong, attackers could rely on wireless networking or sophisticated antennas. But even with ideal placement and transmission power, bad guys would need to be within sight of a polling place to conduct practical attacks on a Wi-Fi-enabled voting machine.

While remote attacks are possible, it’s not like someone could affect voting from another country. They’d more likely need to be parked outside the polling place. So, although Wi-Fi voting machines are a terrible idea, they don’t appear to be an existential threat to democracy at the time being.

Voter information

Rather than attacking ballot-issuing and ballot-counting systems, attackers have more attractive targets. Voter records, for example, are tempting to cybercriminals since they contain enough personally identifiable information (PII) to kick off identity theft and identity fraud attacks at a much larger scale.

Unfortunately, some of these data sets have already been compromised. Almost 200 million voter records were accidentally leaked late in 2015, and the FBI warned in August that some state voter databases have also suffered breaches.

Altering voter registration records is a big deal since such attacks can affect voter turnout. While that’s not what’s being reported today, such an attack could not only nudge election results one way or another, but also raise serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process.

Even though rare, voter fraud has become a hot political issue. Any attack on voter records could trigger complaints about a rigged election and undermine confidence in the entire system.

Perceptions matter

Alarmingly, hacking elections may not involve the actual compromising of ballots or vote counting at all.

Just imagine that someone decided to take down a couple of voter information websites. Would this technically interfere with the election process? Maybe, if some people were trying to find the address for their polling place.

The obvious effect, though, would be to create the impression that the election is under attack, raising concerns about the credibility of the voting process and casting doubt on the results.

Solutions for securing the vote

Technology may be making elections more convenient and efficient, but that same technology can introduce new risks and it needs to be accounted for.

State election boards or commission should test their systems ahead of Election Day in November. They should even try attacking their own systems to discover what’s possible, and what can help defend their systems.

If you are a voter who is concerned about election hacking, local election officials should be able to tell you how they are dealing with potential cyberthreats. And if you really want to help, volunteer at the polls on Election Day.

Interesting Group Behind the Epic Yahoo Hack

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Seems Yahoo could by lying about who actually did the hack and this may be due to the merger between Verizon and Yahoo.

 

The Yahoo hackers weren’t state-sponsored, a security firm says

CSO: Common criminals, not state-sponsored hackers, carried out the massive 2014 data breach that exposed information about millions of Yahoo user accounts, a security firm said Wednesday.

Yahoo has blamed state actors for the attack, but it was actually elite hackers-for-hire who did it, according to InfoArmor, which claims to have some of the stolen information.

The independent security firm found the alleged data as part of its investigation into “Group E,” a team of five professional hackers believed to be from Eastern Europe.

InfoArmor’s claims dispute Yahoo’s contention that a “state-sponsored actor” was behind the data breach, in which information from 500 million user accounts was stolen. Some security experts have been skeptical of Yahoo’s claim and wonder why the company isn’t offering more details.

InfoArmor also claimed that Group E was behind high-profile breaches at LinkedIn, Dropbox and Tumblr. To sell that information, the team has used other hackers, such as Tessa88 and peace_of_mind, to offer the stolen goods on the digital black market.

“The group is really unique,” Komarov said. “They’re responsible for the largest hacks in history, in term of users affected.” More details here.

**** Advice****

You don’t care who has looked at your emails? Really? Consider:

Here’s a simple exercise I invite you to do. Open your email and take a look at everything that you keep on it, both sent and received conversations. Scan all of them, every attachment you ever sent or received, every personal and work conversation, every email draft.

The truth is, we aren’t aware that we are living a big part of our lives through our email inbox.

We keep it all there, in only one place: photos, contracts, invoices, tax forms, reset passwords for every other account, sometimes even passwords or credit card PINs.

And our emails are interconnected to all our other digital accounts, from bank accounts to social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc), cloud services (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox), online shops (Amazon, for, ex, where you most likely saved your credit card details as well) and so on.

By simply breaching the email, a malicious hacker can easily get access to all those. They know how to do that.  Read More here…you REALLY need to.

From Digital Guardian:

Wrapping your head around the idea of a breach that affects half a billion users is a difficult task, and it’s not one that anyone has had to contemplate until now. Yahoo’s data breach is far and away the largest on record in terms of the number of users involved. The economic effect on the company will take years to calculate, and it may never be fully known, as is often the case with these breaches. Though Yahoo, already on the ropes and in the middle of a sale to Verizon, may see some rather unpleasant effects quite soon.

From the user’s perspective, too, the massive amount of data taken in the compromise – including dates of birth, email addresses, physical addresses, and security questions and answers – could have far-reaching effects. The information is an identity thief’s starter kit, even without bank account or payment card data. Yahoo has pointed the finger at a state-sponsored attacker, as is customary in these incidents.

“Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter,” the company said in a statement on the compromise.

As gory as they are, the public details of the Yahoo compromise aren’t what’s really interesting or important here. The intriguing part in this case is how long it took Yahoo to uncover and disclose the data breach. In its public statements, the company said it discovered the compromise recently, but the data was stolen in 2014. That fact has drawn the attention of Capitol Hill and a group of senators is asking some very uncomfortable questions of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

In their letter, Sens. Ed Markey, Patrick Leahy, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Richard Blumenthal and Ron Wyden asked Mayer when and how Yahoo learned of the breach, why the company took so long to uncover it, and whether any government agencies warned Yahoo of an attack by state-sponsored attackers. The lawmakers also said that the data taken from Yahoo could be used easily in other attacks.

“The stolen data included usernames, passwords, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and security questions and answers,” the senators said. “This is highly sensitive, personal information that hackers can use not only to access Yahoo customer accounts, but also potentially to gain access to any other account or service that users access with similar login or personal information, including bank information and social media profiles.” Complete summary here.