Security, Spoken

If there’s one line intelligence officials have stuck to about Russian interference in US elections, it’s that it never stopped. Not after the 2016 election, not after the 2018 midterms, and certainly not now, well into the 2020 primary season. Which is why it should be no great surprise that, as the Washington Post first reported Friday, US officials warned Bernie Sanders that Russia is “attempti...

Bluetooth is used in everything from speakers to implanted pacemakers, which means that Bluetooth-related vulnerabilities can affect a dizzying array of devices. In the latest instance, a newly discovered round of 12 Bluetooth bugs potentially exposes more than 480 devices to attack, including fitness trackers, smart locks, and dozens of medical tools and implants. Learn more about your ad choices...

YouTube Gaming has been clawing its way into streaming platform Twitch’s market share for months. But new data retrieved by WIRED suggests that YouTube Gaming also has a serious problem with scammers and cheat-makers—and lots and lots of bots. In January, all seven of the most-watched YouTube Gaming channels weren’t run by happy gamers livestreaming the game du jour. Learn more about your ad choic...

That laptop on your desk or server on a data center rack isn't so much a computer as a network of them. Its interconnected devices—from hard drives to webcams to trackpads, largely sourced from third parties—have their own dedicated chips and code as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

West Virginia and Oregon have both recently deployed mobile a voting app called Voatz to facilitate absentee voting. But Voatz now turns out to have major security flaws, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—including vulnerabilities that could let a hacker manipulate results. The newly unearthed bugs could allow an attacker to reveal someone's votes, block votes...

In an age of hyper-partisanship, Americans increasingly get their news from sites that align with their political beliefs. But more separates those right and left-leaning sides of the web than their opposite ideologies. According to a new study, the right end of the fractured online news industry also tracks its audience far more aggressively than the left does. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Last month, the cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike was getting settled on an airplane when his seatmate, a midwestern-looking man in his 60s, asked for help. He couldn't figure out how to enable airplane mode on his aging Android phone. But when Marlinspike saw the screen, he wondered for a moment if he was being trolled: Among just a handful of apps installed on the phone was Sign...

Malign foreign influence operations during the 2016 United States presidential election season raised awareness about the need for tighter security within campaigns. And while the 2020 presidential campaigns have shown some improvement, many are still seriously lagging—and facing real threats—with nine months left before election day. Now Google is trying to help move the needle. Learn more about...

Well, here we are again. Even years later, it's still hard to fully grasp the degree to which Yahoo failed at protecting the data of billions of people across multiple breaches in the 2010s. But now, thanks to a class action suit against Yahoo that has reached a proposed settlement, you have until July 20 to file a claim if you were impacted. Don't miss out on your chance for a $100 apology. Learn...

Despite its best damage control efforts, Facebook is still dogged by its checkered past on data privacy. But at least some of the security mechanisms the company has put in place are catching problems—and helping them get fixed. Facebook said on Friday that in 2019 its bug bounty saw its largest number of accepted bugs since the program launched nine years ago, paid out its highest single reward e...

The week kicked off with the Iowa caucuses, which went very poorly, in so many ways! We'll talk about a few of them below, but the main takeaway is that adding unvetted technology to the voting process—or anything—rarely makes things better. Other states, please take note! Actually, Nevada and New Hampshire already have. It's a start. In another unwelcome technological evolution, ransomware has st...

Welcome to a dark day in America’s modern experiment with democracy. Despite becoming the first president ever to receive votes from both parties to convict and remove him from office in an impeachment trial, President Donald Trump today woke up in the White House unbound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Almost three years ago, artist Simon Weckert noticed something unusual at a May Day demonstration in Berlin: Google Maps showed there was a massive traffic jam, even though there were zero cars on the road. Soon enough, Weckert realized that it was the mass of people, or more specifically their smartphones, that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street. And then he...

Kaliya Young doesn’t want to break up Facebook. She wants to make it obsolete. She was an Olympic-level water polo player for Canada, but in 2002 was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Freshly graduated from university and living in the San Francisco Bay Area, she went through months of radiation and chemotherapy that sapped her physical strength. In her mid-twenties, far from home, no longer an a...

Have you heard about this little thing called Space Force? If so, it's probably through ridicule; the latest branch of the US military has received no shortage of it since it launched at the end of last year. Still, at least it had a better week than Intel, which had to release a patch for a patch for its patch of its ZombieLoad problem. Say that five times fast. This week we also took a look at t...

This year’s crop of Super Bowl ads includes plenty of the usual suspects: expensive cars, cheap beers, big tech. But among the companies coughing up a reported $5.6 million for 30 seconds of Big Game glory is one name most people have never heard of, selling a product that many don’t know exists: Dashlane, an app that manages your passwords. It’s not that password management is entirely novel. Lea...

Elizabeth Warren has a plan for dealing with disinformation. Sort of. Yesterday, the Democratic senator and presidential candidate known for her detailed policy objectives released a proposal titled “Fighting Digital Disinformation.” The part about what she intends to do as president, however, is a bit thin by her standards. The bulk of the plan is devoted instead to what Warren wants social media...

The internet was designed to make information free and easy for anyone to access. But as the amount of personal information online has grown, so too have the risks. Last weekend, a nightmare scenario for many privacy advocates arrived. The New York Times revealed Clearview AI, a secretive surveillance company, was selling a facial recognition tool to law enforcement powered by “three billion image...

Law enforcement in the United States, international spies, and criminals have all used (and abused) the surveillance tools known as "stingrays" for more than a decade. The devices can track people's locations and even eavesdrop on their calls, all thanks to weaknesses in the cellular network. Today, researchers are detailing a way to stop them—if only telecoms would listen. Learn more about your a...

The popular misconception that Macs don’t get viruses has become a lot less popular in recent years, as Apple devices have weathered their fair share of bugs. But it’s still surprising that the most prolific malware on macOS—by one count, affecting one in 10 devices—is so relatively crude. This week, antivirus company Kaspersky detailed the 10 most common threats its macOS users encountered in 201...

In a criminal complaint released Monday, the Brazilian government is charging journalist Glenn Greenwald with committing cybercrimes. The accusations are connected to leaked text messages that Greenwald reported on last year for The Intercept Brasil, which the outspoken journalist launched in 2016 as a spinoff of the US-based news site he had founded two years prior. Learn more about your ad choic...

On a small, blue-lit stage in a dim side room of the Fillmore Theater in Miami on Tuesday, three men sat behind laptops in front of a small crowd. Two of them nervously reviewed the commands on a screen in front of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On November 8, 2018, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos received an unexpected text message from Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman. The two had exchanged numbers a few months prior, in April, at a small dinner in Los Angeles, but weren’t in regular contact; Bezos had previously received only a video file from the crown prince in May that reportedly extolled Saudi Arabia’s economy. Learn more about your...

Chrome is protecting and Sonos is disconnecting, but first: a cartoon about the new big screen. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Don't ignore Chrome's new password checkup feature If you've logged in to any accounts on Google Chrome recently, you've probably noticed a new pop-up n...

End-to-end encryption is a staple of secure messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. It ensures that no one—even the app developer—can access your data as it traverses the web. But what if you could bring some version of that protection to increasingly ubiquitous—and notoriously insecure—Internet of Things devices? The Swiss cryptography firm Teserakt is trying just that. Learn more about your ad...