@The Blaze
Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, a pair of convicted hackers based in Alexandria, Virginia, were arrested on Wednesday over an alleged conspiracy to destroy government databases and other crimes.After doing prison time for wire fraud and conspiring to hack into the U.S. State Department, the Akhter twins, one of whom previously served as a cybersecurity contractor with the State Department, managed to secure jobs as federal contractors — working as engineers for Opexus.'Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems.'Opexus, a company that handles sensitive data for most federal agencies and has received over $50 million in contracts from various agencies over the past decade, determined earlier this year that it had been compromised in February by two employees.A Bloomberg investigation revealed in May that after one of the agencies with which Opexus was working, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, flagged the twins as possible threats on account of their criminal records, the duo were fired on Feb. 18.The company later discovered that while being fired and immediately afterward, the twins allegedly accessed sensitive documents and compromised or scrubbed dozens of databases, including those containing data from the General Services Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.The FBI, FDIC Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, and Homeland Security Investigations investigated the case.The brothers were indicted on Nov. 13 for allegedly working to harm Opexus and its U.S. government clients "by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities," the DOJ said in a release.RELATED: Could hackers target your car's tires? Muneeb Akhter. Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post via Getty ImagesAccording to the indictment, Muneeb Akhter allegedly deleted approximately 96 databases storing U.S. government information — including databases containing records and documents related to Freedom of Information Act matters as well as sensitive federal investigative files.Muneeb Akhter is also accused of asking an artificial intelligence tool how they could cover their tracks after deleting a DHS database.After he got fired from Opexus, Muneeb Akhter allegedly obtained data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is accused further of stealing copies of IRS information including federal tax information and other identifying information for at least 450 individuals.Opexus did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News."These defendants abused their positions as federal contractors to attack government databases and steal sensitive government information," said Matthew Galeotti, acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice's Criminal Division, in a statement. "Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems and disrupted agencies’ ability to serve the American people."Muneeb Akhter has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of federal records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft. His twin, Sohaib Akhter, was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records and computer fraud.While Sohaib Akhter faces a maximum penalty of six years in prison, Muneeb Akhter faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years of prison time for each aggravated identity theft count and a maximum penalty of 45 years for the other charges.The duo pleaded guilty in 2015 to a different set of crimes.Muneeb Akhter hacked into the website of a cosmetics company and stole thousands of customers' credit card and personal information. He and his brother used the stolen data to pay for flights, hotel stays, various goods, and attendance at professional conferences. Muneeb Akhter proceeded to hand off the stolen data to a "dark net" operator who cut him in on the profits from the sales.The other brother, meanwhile, used his contract position at the State Department in 2015 to steal personally identifiable data belonging to various people including co-workers and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating him.According to the Justice Department, Sohaib Akhter later hatched a scheme to ensure perpetual access to various State Department systems and, with the help of his twin, attempted to install an electronic collection device inside a State Department office, which would have enabled the hackers to remotely steal federal data.Years earlier, Muneeb Akhter hacked into a Maryland-based private data aggregation company that he was performing contract work for, giving his brother access to a database of federal contract information to give their technology company an upper hand when bidding for contracts and clients.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
https://www.theblaze.com/news/convicted-hacker-twins-who-landed-jobs-as-federal-contractors-nabbed-for-allegedly-deleting-government-databases
Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, a pair of convicted hackers based in Alexandria, Virginia, were arrested on Wednesday over an alleged conspiracy to destroy government databases and other crimes.After doing prison time for wire fraud and conspiring to hack into the U.S. State Department, the Akhter twins, one of whom previously served as a cybersecurity contractor with the State Department, managed to secure jobs as federal contractors — working as engineers for Opexus.'Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems.'Opexus, a company that handles sensitive data for most federal agencies and has received over $50 million in contracts from various agencies over the past decade, determined earlier this year that it had been compromised in February by two employees.A Bloomberg investigation revealed in May that after one of the agencies with which Opexus was working, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, flagged the twins as possible threats on account of their criminal records, the duo were fired on Feb. 18.The company later discovered that while being fired and immediately afterward, the twins allegedly accessed sensitive documents and compromised or scrubbed dozens of databases, including those containing data from the General Services Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.The FBI, FDIC Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, and Homeland Security Investigations investigated the case.The brothers were indicted on Nov. 13 for allegedly working to harm Opexus and its U.S. government clients "by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities," the DOJ said in a release.RELATED: Could hackers target your car's tires? Muneeb Akhter. Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post via Getty ImagesAccording to the indictment, Muneeb Akhter allegedly deleted approximately 96 databases storing U.S. government information — including databases containing records and documents related to Freedom of Information Act matters as well as sensitive federal investigative files.Muneeb Akhter is also accused of asking an artificial intelligence tool how they could cover their tracks after deleting a DHS database.After he got fired from Opexus, Muneeb Akhter allegedly obtained data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is accused further of stealing copies of IRS information including federal tax information and other identifying information for at least 450 individuals.Opexus did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News."These defendants abused their positions as federal contractors to attack government databases and steal sensitive government information," said Matthew Galeotti, acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice's Criminal Division, in a statement. "Their actions jeopardized the security of government systems and disrupted agencies’ ability to serve the American people."Muneeb Akhter has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of federal records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft. His twin, Sohaib Akhter, was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records and computer fraud.While Sohaib Akhter faces a maximum penalty of six years in prison, Muneeb Akhter faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years of prison time for each aggravated identity theft count and a maximum penalty of 45 years for the other charges.The duo pleaded guilty in 2015 to a different set of crimes.Muneeb Akhter hacked into the website of a cosmetics company and stole thousands of customers' credit card and personal information. He and his brother used the stolen data to pay for flights, hotel stays, various goods, and attendance at professional conferences. Muneeb Akhter proceeded to hand off the stolen data to a "dark net" operator who cut him in on the profits from the sales.The other brother, meanwhile, used his contract position at the State Department in 2015 to steal personally identifiable data belonging to various people including co-workers and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating him.According to the Justice Department, Sohaib Akhter later hatched a scheme to ensure perpetual access to various State Department systems and, with the help of his twin, attempted to install an electronic collection device inside a State Department office, which would have enabled the hackers to remotely steal federal data.Years earlier, Muneeb Akhter hacked into a Maryland-based private data aggregation company that he was performing contract work for, giving his brother access to a database of federal contract information to give their technology company an upper hand when bidding for contracts and clients.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
https://www.theblaze.com/news/convicted-hacker-twins-who-landed-jobs-as-federal-contractors-nabbed-for-allegedly-deleting-government-databases
For most of modern Western scientific history, mind reading has been dismissed as fantasy. It’s a topic mainstream medicine ignores, as it can’t be explained without challenging the materialist worldview — that the universe and everything in it is merely physical stuff — which has dominated science since the Enlightenment.But one person is changing that. Dr. Diane Hennacy, a neuroscientist and author, says her research proves that mind reading, telepathy, and other paranormal abilities are not only possible, they’re thriving in a very specific population: nonverbal autistic people.In this riveting interview, Glenn Beck speaks with Dr. Hennacy about mind-bending phenomena that will upend the way you think about human consciousness. Dr. Hennacy’s research inspired the highly popular podcast “The Telepathy Tapes” — a deep dive into claims of telepathy, savant skills, and other types of extrasensory perception in nonspeaking autistic people.Most believe that autistic individuals who cannot speak aren’t cognitively functioning at full capacity. In other words, they’re not “all there,” but Dr. Hennacy says the opposite is true. They’re ultra there. Even though autism is the result of a disruption in one’s brain development, the brain doesn’t necessarily fail to develop; it just pivots and develops differently to accommodate for a loss of sensory motor skills.Her theory is that when autism bars a child from verbal communication and typical cognition, he taps into different kinds of processing. “It's a more primal sense that I think we all have, but what happens is it gets buried ... and it atrophies to some extent,” she explains.These alternative pathways to knowledge and communication give people abilities the neurotypical world can’t even begin to fathom, like the ability to read minds, communicate telepathically, accurately predict the future, perform complex skills they’ve never been taught, and access hidden information — almost as if they see beyond the physical realm into an immaterial plane of universal knowledge.Dr. Hennacy gives several examples: a boy who could sense illness in people, children who can read their caretaker’s mind with near perfect accuracy, and people who can perform extraordinary tasks without ever having been taught.Non-speakers she’s met and studied from all over the world report congregating at a place dubbed “the hill” — an immaterial spiritual space they say is “guarded by angels,” who teach them things.“If you look at spiritual traditions, [specifically] Eastern spiritual traditions, they talk about a place that sounds just like the hill, and it really is a spiritual realm that you can go to when you reach a certain level of spiritual development,” says Dr. Hennacy.“In a way, I think that we all come from the hill, and what happens is as we identify more and more with this identity — as Diane or Glenn or whoever ... we become more and more disconnected from the source that we come from,” she theorizes.“Now what we need to do is we need to learn how to climb the hill back up, and I think that these autistic kids, it's almost like they’re our sherpa guides.”To hear Dr. Hennacy’s story — how she went from a scientist committed to the materialist paradigm to one of the world’s leading experts in extrasensory perception — and hear more of her stunning research, watch the full interview above.Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Reality is hard for many people across the political spectrum to accept, especially when it comes to children being raised by their married, biological mother and father.“Before you post your caveats and your kind of exceptions to that, that is the ideal. That is in general true. That is in principle true. Every data set we have — and we’ll get into some specific numbers — shows that kids are best suited to live with their married biological mom and dad,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says.While sometimes the scenarios that lead to a child being separated from both or one of his biological parents are tragic, sometimes they’re also simply because of the “sexual revolution that has occurred over the past 20 years and especially the past 10 since Obergefell.”“We are talking about intentionally creating motherless and fatherless children, intentionally taking children out of the ideal and putting them in — in the most charitable terms — a less than ideal situation, knowing that the data shows us that this is not best for their well-being,” Stuckey explains.And it’s no longer just two men or two women ensuring that children grow up in these less than ideal, fatherless or motherless situations.In Canada, three men who are in a “polycule” adopted a three-year-old girl through Quebec’s youth protection services. The “polycule” had to be approved first as foster parents, which they say required “a lot of work and openness to their relationship.”“It’s through that process that they learned that we are a little different because we’re three, but we’re not different from any other family,” one of the men said in an interview.“You actually are, though, because you’re three dudes, which tells me you have no moral limits. Like if you’re willing to not only defy nature, and you are willing to defy even liberal definitions of marriage, and you live in some kind of inherently unstable polycule situation, then you do not have the correct components to raise a child,” Stuckey says.“Even if we take religion out of it, let’s just look at this scientifically,” she continues. “Two men or two women who want to be in a relationship have to acknowledge that they do not have the parts that are needed to create a child. And therefore, because biology, not bigotry, has set limitations on your reproductive abilities, then there should be limits and restrictions and regulations around your ability to obtain and raise a child.”“I’m very sad for this little girl. … This little girl would be better off in foster care until she is 18 years old than living with three men who are living in a polycule situation. One hundred percent. Because there is no end to the confusion and instability and chaos that a situation like this can cause,” she adds.Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.