Criminals are still trying to shake down Attack.Ransom users of the Ashley Madison dating/cheating online service . As you might remember , the service was hacked Attack.Databreach in 2015 , and the attackers stole Attack.Databreach sensitive personal and financial data of 37 million users , and later dumped it online . Since then , cyber criminals have been attempting to monetize this data by sending emails to users whose info they found in the dump , threatening to reveal all of it to the target ’ s nearest and dearest , and asking for money Attack.Ransom in exchange for silence . The emails generally contain some of the target ’ s personal data as to make the threat believable , and often claims that the attackers have found the target ’ s Facebook account and , therefore , have the means to contact their friends , family , and employer . In this latest round of blackmail attempts Attack.Ransom , they are threatening to set up a site and publish all the stolen information . “ On May 1 2017 we are launching our new site – Cheaters Gallery – exposing those who cheat and destroy families . We will launch the site with a big email to all the friends and family of cheaters taken from Facebook , LinkedIn and other social sites . This will include you if do not pay to opting out , ” the email says , as noted by ZDNet ’ s Robin Harris , who received one . The extortionists are asking for Attack.Ransom some $ 500 ( in Bitcoin ) . It ’ s impossible to tell whether these crooks are the same ones that mounted previous email blackmail attempts Attack.Ransom . What is definitely obvious is that they are betting on there still being some users with too much to lose if the information gets out . Harris did not share the contents of the email he received , but recipients can be sure that if their Facebook or other social media account isn ’ t specified in it , the blackmailers haven ’ t actually connected the two accounts . More likely than not , they have simply written a script that takes specific info from the Ashley Madison data dump Attack.Databreach , inserts it in a template email , and fires these emails off to as many recipients as possible .

Another presidential election , another massive data dump Attack.Databreach seemingly intended to sabotage a center-left candidate . But in the case of France 's impending runoff , slated for Sunday , the latest leak Attack.Databreach of emails appears far more slap-dash than the Russian hacks and leaks Attack.Databreach that plagued Hillary Clinton 's campaign . And in this case , they 're timed to prevent the target of those leaks from even having a chance to respond . On Friday , a collection of links to torrent files appeared on the anonymous publishing site PasteBin . The 9GB trove purports to be an archive of leaked emails from the party of Emmanuel Macron , the left-leaning candidate currently favored to win France 's impending runoff election against far-right opponent Marine Le Pen . The latest data dump Attack.Databreach comes less than 48 hours before France 's election , possibly too late to shift its outcome—at least to the degree that the hacks of the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta did in the months leading up to the US election . Its timing so close to the runoff could still prove strategic , as French law forbids candidates from speaking publicly for two days ahead of an election . That timing could prevent Macron himself from responding to any scandal that surfaces in the data dump Attack.Databreach , real or fabricated . In a statement , Macron ’ s political party confirmed that hackers had compromised Attack.Databreach it . `` The En Marche party has been the victim of a massive , coordinated act of hacking Attack.Databreach , in which diverse internal information ( mails , documents , accounting , contracts ) have been broadcast this evening on social networks , '' reads a public statement in French from the Macron campaign . `` The files which are circulating were obtained Attack.Databreach a few weeks ago thanks to the hacking Attack.Databreach of the professional and personal email accounts of several members of the campaign . '' Late last month , the security firm Trend Micro noted in a report that the Macron campaign appeared to be a target of the Russian-government-linked hacker group Fancy Bear , also known as Pawn Storm or APT 28 . The firm 's researchers found a phishing domain created by the hacker group in March , designed to target the campaign by impersonating Attack.Phishing the site that En March uses for cloud data storage . At the time , the Macron campaign claimed that that hacking attempts had failed . On Friday morning , users of the anonymous forum 4Chan had also purported to have published evidence of Macron 's tax evasion , though those claims were also unverified , and it 's not clear if they 're connected to the current leak . In the wake of Russian hackers ' attempt to sway the US election , which remains the subject of two Congressional investigations , the cybersecurity community has warned that the Kremlin may attempt similar tricks to swing elections towards its favored candidates in the French and upcoming German elections , too . Former British intelligence staffer Matt Tait warned that regardless of what it contains , the simple fact of the data dump Attack.Databreach achieves certain objectives . `` By all means , look through them , '' he wrote on Twitter . `` But do [ so ] with your eyes open and knowing that you 're being played for free negative coverage/headlines . '' The Macron campaign compared the hacking directly to the hacker targeting of Clinton campaign . `` Intervening in the last hour of an official campaign , this operation clearly seeks to destabilize democracy , as already seen in the United States ' last president campaign , '' the statement reads . `` We can not tolerate that the vital interests of democracy are thus endangered . ''

This file photo taken on August 13 , 2008 shows a man walking over the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA ) in the lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley , Va. Wikileaks ' latest data dump Attack.Databreach , the `` Vault 7 , '' purporting to reveal the Central Intelligence Agency 's hacking tools , appears to be something of a dud . If you did n't know before that spy agencies could apply these tools and techniques , you 're naive , and if you think it undermines the attribution of hacker attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other targets , you 'll be disappointed . On the surface , the dump Attack.Databreach — touted by Wikileaks as the biggest ever publication of confidential CIA documents — offers some explosive revelations . They 're all over the news pages : The CIA is able to use your Samsung smart TV to eavesdrop Attack.Databreach on you ! The CIA can get into your iPhone or Android device , as well as your Windows , Mac or Linux PC , and harvest Attack.Databreach your communications before they are encrypted ! No encryption app — not even the Edward Snowden favorite , Signal , or WhatsApp , which uses the same encryption — is safe ! The CIA hoards `` zero day '' vulnerabilities — weaknesses not known to the software 's vendors — instead of revealing Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability them to the likes of Google , Apple and Microsoft ! CIA hackers use obfuscation tools to pretend its malware was made by someone else , including Russian intelligence ! There 's even a Buzzfeed story quoting current and former U.S. intelligence officers that the dump is `` worse than Snowden 's . '' There is little content in the dump to support these panicky reactions . Nothing in it indicates that the CIA has broken messenger encryption , as Open Whisper Systems , the software organization responsible for Signal , has been quick to point out . The CIA can read Attack.Databreach messenger communications only if it plants malware on a specific phone or computer ; then it can harvest Attack.Databreach keystrokes and take screenshots . This is not about mass surveillance — something that should bother the vast majority of internet users — but about monitoring specific targets . Open Whisper Systems tweeted on March 7 : `` Ubiquitous e2e encryption is pushing intelligence agencies from undetectable mass surveillance to expensive , high-risk , targeted attacks . '' It 's not much of a secret that using a hacked phone or computer renders end-to-end encryption useless . It was the essence of Apple 's dispute with the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year , when the company would n't help the FBI get into a phone owned by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook . The Big Brother-style implications of a hacked Samsung TV are undermined by the nature of the documents that describe the hack . The CIA needs physical access to the TV set to weaponize it . Robert Graham , founder of Errata Security , wrote on the firm 's blog : `` The docs are clear that they can update the software running on the TV using a USB drive . There 's no evidence of them doing so remotely over the Internet . If you are n't afraid of the CIA breaking in an installing a listening device , then you should't be afraid of the CIA installing listening software . '' The Wikileaks cache contains a manual for CIA hackers on making their malware harder to trace , for example , by adding foreign languages . Wikileaks also said that the CIA `` collects Attack.Databreach and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ' stolen Attack.Databreach ' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation . '' The library , however , contains all sorts of publicly available malware , as well as samples tentatively attributed to foreign intelligence services ; all that does is confirm that hackers , including CIA ones , are n't picky about the origins of the products they use . The important thing is that the malware should work . This should n't affect serious attempts to attribute hacker attacks . I 'm not sure this is fully understood within the U.S. intelligence community itself — at any rate , the declassified report on Russian hacking it released late last year appeared to base attribution on the use of specific publicly available malware . But industry experts usually need much more evidence . A number of possible Russian attacks were attributed to Moscow 's intelligence services because the attackers used specific command and control centers — servers — to collect Attack.Databreach information from various Russia adversaries . To set up a false flag operation , the CIA would need to go much further than obfuscating the origins of its malicious code . So all the jubilant tweets from Trump supporters declaring the CIA was behind the `` Russian hacks '' are at least premature and probably inaccurate .