David Edwards has spent over a decade reporting on social justice, human rights and politics for Raw Story. He also writes Crooks and Liars. He has a background in enterprise resource planning and previously managed the network infrastructure for the North Carolina Department of Correction.
Mark Meadows speaking with attendees at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reportedly accepted an immunity agreement to testify under oath against former President Donald Trump.
Sources told ABC News that special counsel Jack Smith's team has met with Meadows at least three times in recent months.
Meadows said that he told Trump there was no widespread election fraud in the 2020 election, according to the report. Trump has insisted he believed the election was fundamentally flawed.
"Obviously we didn't win," Meadows remarked, one source revealed.
A top Maine Democrat says her party will take action if Nebraska Republicans move to change their electoral college rules to help Donald Trump.
House majority leader Maureen Terry said Friday that if Nebraska’s Republican governor signs legislation that allows for a winner-take-all election in the state in 2024, the Democratic-controlled Legislature would “be compelled to act in order to restore fairness," Politico reported.
Maine and Nebraska awards some of their electoral votes according to which candidate wins individual congressional districts, which would seemingly allow Trump to win one Electoral College vote from Maine and Joe Biden winning one from Nebraska.
The Nebraska GOP now wants to block any chances for President Joe Biden to earn an electoral college vote by winning the state’s Omaha-district. While a bill for such a change remains stagnant in the Legislature, a new push from Trump supporters to push the bill through is resurrecting its potential.
“I am steadfast in my commitment to get winner-take-all over the finish line, thereby honoring our constitutional founding, unifying our state and ending the three-decade-old mistake of allocating Nebraska’s electoral votes differently than all but one other state,” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen has said.
If the legislation is successful, it would block Biden’s simplest path to reelection -- "holding the three 'Blue Wall' states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while also winning Nebraska’s 2nd District, a blue-trending seat based in Omaha," Politico's report stated.
“Voters in Maine and voters in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District value their independence, but they also value fairness and playing by the rules,” Terry said. “If Nebraska’s Republican governor and Republican-controlled Legislature were to change their electoral system this late in the cycle in order to unfairly award Donald Trump an additional electoral vote, I think the Maine Legislature would be compelled to act in order to restore fairness to our country’s electoral system.”
Former President Donald Trump's team demanded his criminal hush money trial judge lift the gag order against him in a rambling social media post sent out Friday.
Earlier in the day, Trump complained to the media that his trial would prevent him from spending the day with his wife for her birthday, but when Trump reentered the courthouse Friday afternoon, it was without a word to the press.
"He is being inundated by the Media with questions because of this Rigged Biden Trial, which President Trump is not allowed to comment on, or answer, because of Judge Juan Merchan’s UNPRECEDENTED AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL Gag Order," the statement reads.
"There has never been a situation like this in our Country’s History, a Candidate that is not allowed to answer questions."
This questionable demand comes as Merchan considers possible gag order violations and what, if any, punishment should follow.
The gag order prevents Trump from attacking witnesses, jurors and others involved in the case, but allows him to discuss Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
But, on Friday, Trump's team claimed, "His Opponents have unlimited rights to question, but he has no right to respond."
The post repeats Trump's own repeated claim that Bragg's case — in which Trump stands accused of falsifying business records to bury catch-and-kill payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election — represents a political witch hunt.
"We request that Judge Merchan immediately LIFT THE GAG ORDER, so that President Trump is able to freely state his views, feelings, and policies," the post reads. "He is asking for his Constitutional Right to Free Speech. If it is not granted, this again becomes a Rigged Election!"
You probably know better than to click on links that download unknown files onto your computer. It turns out that uploading files can get you into trouble, too.
Today’s web browsers are much more powerful than earlier generations of browsers. They’re able to manipulate data within both the browser and the computer’s local file system. Users can send and receive email, listen to music or watch a movie within a browser with the click of a button.
Unfortunately, these capabilities also mean that hackers can find clever ways to abuse the browsers to trick you into letting ransomware lock up your files when you think that you’re simply doing your usual tasks online.
The threat applies to Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge browsers but not Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox. Chrome accounts for 65% of browsers used, and Edge accounts for 5%. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no reports of hackers using this method so far.
My colleagues, who include a Google security researcher, and I have communicated with the developers responsible for the File System Access API, and they have expressed support for our work and interest in our approaches to defending against this kind of attack. We also filed a security report to Microsoft but have not heard from them.
Double-edged sword
Today’s browsers are almost operating systems unto themselves. They can run software programs and encrypt files. These capabilities, combined with the browser’s access to the host computer’s files – including ones in the cloud, shared folders and external drives – via the File System Access API creates a new opportunity for ransomware.
Imagine you want to edit photos on a benign-looking free online photo editing tool. When you upload the photos for editing, any hackers who control the malicious editing tool can access the files on your computer via your browser. The hackers would gain access to the folder you are uploading from and all subfolders. Then the hackers could encrypt the files in your file system and demand a ransom payment to decrypt them.
Today’s web browsers are more powerful – and in some ways more vulnerable – than their predecessors.
Ransomware is a growing problem. Attacks have hit individuals as well as organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, banks, cloud service providers, cruise operators, threat-monitoring services, chip manufacturers, governments, medical centers and hospitals, insurance companies, schools, universities and even police departments. In 2023, organizations paid more than US$1.1 billion in ransomware payments to attackers, and 19 ransomware attacks targeted organizations every second.
It is no wonder ransomware is the No. 1 arms race today between hackers and security specialists. Traditional ransomware runs on your computer after hackers have tricked you into downloading it.
New defenses for a new threat
A team of researchers I lead at the Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab at Florida International University, including postdoctoral researcher Abbas Acar and Ph.D. candidate Harun Oz, in collaboration with Google Senior Research Scientist Güliz Seray Tuncay, have been investigating this new type of potential ransomware for the past two years. Specifically, we have been exploring how powerful modern web browsers have become and how they can be weaponized by hackers to create novel forms of ransomware.
In our paper, RøB: Ransomware over Modern Web Browsers, which was presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in August 2023, we showed how this emerging ransomware strain is easy to design and how damaging it can be. In particular, we designed and implemented the first browser-based ransomware called RøB and analyzed its use with browsers running on three different major operating systems – Windows, Linux and MacOS – five cloud providers and five antivirus products.
Our evaluations showed that RøB is capable of encrypting numerous types of files. Because RøB runs within the browser, there are no malicious payloads for a traditional antivirus program to catch. This means existing ransomware detection systems face several issues against this powerful browser-based ransomware.
We proposed three different defense approaches to mitigate this new ransomware type. These approaches operate at different levels – browser, file system and user – and complement one another.
The first approach temporarily halts a web application – a program that runs in the browser – in order to detect encrypted user files. The second approach monitors the activity of the web application on the user’s computer to identify ransomware-like patterns. The third approach introduces a new permission dialog box to inform users about the risks and implications associated with allowing web applications to access their computer’s file system.
When it comes to protecting your computer, be careful about where you upload as well as download files. Your uploads could be giving hackers an “in” to your computer.
