Security, Spoken

Plus: A Windows zero day, an iOS watering hole, and more of the week's top security news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple kicked Alex Jones out of the App Store in 2018. The Google Play Store has finally followed suit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The US is desperate for hospital beds. The USACE can build thousands of them in a matter of days. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After over a million downloads, the Tekya-infected Android offerings are finally on ice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A years-long investigation and global cooperation disrupted one of the biggest botnets ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The World Health Organization is partnering with the messaging app to help disseminate trustworthy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As more people work from home and anxiety mounts, expect cyberattacks of all sorts to take advantage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shadowserver has helped keep the internet safe for 15 years. Unless it can raise funds fast, it's going to disappear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new documentary makes crystal clear how little time remains to protect the 2020 election. Â Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's a rule of thumb in cybersecurity that the more sensitive your system, the less you want it to touch the internet. But as the US hunkers down to limit the spread of Covid-19, cybersecurity measures presents a difficult technical challenge to working remotely for employees at critical infrastructure, intelligence agencies, and anywhere else with high-security networks. In some cases, working fr...

You'd think that mammography machines, radiology systems, and ultrasounds would maintain the strictest possible security hygiene. But new research shows that a whopping 83 percent of medical imaging devices run on operating systems that are so old they no longer receive any software updates at all. That issue is endemic to Internet of Things devices generally, many of which aren't designed to rece...

Since Russia’s stunning influence operations during the 2016 United States presidential race, state and federal officials, researchers, and tech companies have been on high alert for a repeat performance. With the 2020 election now just seven months away, though, newly surfaced social media posts indicate that Russia’s Internet Research Agency is adapting its methods to circumvent those defenses....

Over the past few years, owners of cars with keyless start systems have learned to worry about so-called relay attacks, in which hackers exploit radio-enabled keys to steal vehicles without leaving a trace. Now it turns out that many millions of other cars that use chip-enabled mechanical keys are also vulnerable to high-tech theft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

Opening email attachments from untrusted senders has long been one of the easiest ways to get hacked. But unlike other common security screw-ups—using "password" for your password, downloading pirated software from shady websites—there's no practical way for a modern human to avoid opening the occasional mystery-meat attachment. Now one technologist has produced a solution. Learn more about your a...

This is a story about something that could have gone wrong on the internet this week but instead turned out mostly OK. How often can you say that? Around nine o’clock on the East Coast on Friday, February 28, bad news arrived on the doorstep of Let’s Encrypt. An arm of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, Let’s Encrypt is a so-called certificate authority that lets websites implement en...

As the novel coronavirus continues to propagate, phishing scams that pose as Covid-19 advice do as well. The trend started over a month ago, but it's only going to get worse. Abide by these tips to avoid them, and also please keep washing those hands. In non-pandemic news, researchers figured out how to clone the mechanical keys of tens of millions of cars from Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia, making the...

A bipartisan pair of US senators today introduced long-rumored legislation known as the EARN IT Act. Meant to combat child sexual exploitation online, the bill threatens to erode established protections against holding tech companies responsible for what people do and say on their platforms. It also poses the most serious threat in years to strong end-to-end encryption. Learn more about your ad ch...

In 2003, security researchers Katie Moussouris and a colleague at enterprise security firm @stake—which would later be acquired by Symantec—found a bad flaw in an encrypted flash drive from Lexar. It was trivial to uncover the password that decrypted the drive's data. But when they tried to let Lexar know? "Things went wrong," says Chris Wyspol, who was also working at @stake at the time. Learn mo...

For years, North Korea's Lazarus Group hackers have plundered and pillaged the global internet, scamming and infecting digital devices around the world for espionage, profit, and sabotage. One of their weapons of choice: a so-called loader that allows them to clandestinely run a diverse array of malware on targeted Macs with hardly a trace. But Lazarus didn't create the loader on its own. The grou...

It was the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week, and the security industry descended on Moscone Center for days of handing out free stickers, demoing products, and presenting research. And the week was punctuated by fewer handshakes and more elbow bumps thanks to Covid-19. WIRED looked at research that North Korea is recycling Mac malware, and how it's indicative of booming malware r...

John Strand breaks into things for a living. As a penetration tester, he gets hired by organizations to attack their defenses, helping reveal weaknesses before actual bad guys find them. Normally, Strand embarks on these missions himself, or deploys one of his experienced colleagues at Black Hills Information Security. But in July 2014, prepping for a pen test of a South Dakota correctional facili...

As Richard Grenell, the current US ambassador to Germany, starts his second day on the job as the nation’s acting director of national intelligence, his arrival also marks the ouster of not only his predecessor, Joseph Maguire, but reportedly also of DNI principle executive Andrew Hallman. By the end of the day, almost all of the roles created after 9/11 literally to prevent the next 9/11 will be...

Distributing malware by attaching tainted documents to emails is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's not just a theoretical risk—real attackers use malicious documents to infect targets all the time. So on top of its anti-spam and anti-phishing efforts, Gmail expanded its malware detection capabilities at the end of last year to include more tailored document monitoring. And it's working. L...

At 10:28 pm on November 1, an image of an unknown and classified Pokémon appeared in a Discord group. Gigantamax Machamp, the megasized version of the body-builder Pokémon, was slated to appear in the then-unreleased games Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. Within minutes, JPEGs of it were posted to 4chan. Then, on a dedicated Pokémon Reddit. It wasn’t long until 300 URLs were hosting it. Learn mor...

This week was filled with wide-scale calamity. Hundreds of millions of PCs have components whose firmware is vulnerable to hacking—which is to say, pretty much all of them. It's a problem that's been known about for years, but doesn't seem to get any better. Likewise, Bluetooth implementation mistakes in seven SoC—system on chips—have exposed at least 480 internet of things devices to a range of a...