Security, Spoken

In these predominantly digital times, it's all too easy to build up a long trail of unused accounts that are now gathering dust: free trials that you never followed up on, streaming services you abandoned, on-demand clothing boxes that in the end weren't quite what you were looking for, and so on. In some ways these old accounts aren't doing any harm besides gathering virtual dust or sending you t...

Spend enough time on the social media app TikTok, and you’re bound to see a Life360 meme. That’s because Life360, a location-sharing app aimed at families, is apparently ruining the lives of teenagers all across the United States. The service allows parents to track their kids’ whereabouts in real time, among other features. As one girl with long blond hair jokes in a popular TikTok clip, it’s set...

In the wake of jarring revelations about how United States law enforcement agencies have deployed facial recognition, Congress seemed, for a moment, galvanized to act. Based on a Homeland Security Committee hearing in the House Wednesday, that moment appears to be fading—as hundreds of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials continue to amass and access the controversial data every day...

You may not recognize the name Magecart, but you’ve seen its impact. A set of sophisticated hacking groups, Magecart has been behind some of the bigger hacks of the past few years, from British Airways to Ticketmaster, all with the singular goal of stealing credit card numbers. Think of them as the ATM skimmers of the web. And thanks to poor security hygiene, they’ve managed to hit 17,000 domains...

Next week, Amazon will celebrate Prime Day, a bacchanal of modestly discounted ephemera. But amid the flurry of cheap TVs and ebooks and what else, maybe Instant Pots? Watch out for this clever phishing campaign that might hit your inbox. Researchers from security company McAfee today have shared details of a so-called phishing kit, which contains the tools an aspiring hacker would need to kick of...

The announcement came as we began to board. Last month, I was at Detroit’s Metro Airport for a connecting flight to Southeast Asia. I listened as a Delta Air Lines staff member informed passengers that the boarding process would use facial recognition instead of passport scanners. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Allie Funk is a research analyst for Freedom on the Net, Freedom House's annual country-by-country...

YouTube is currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission following complaints that the platform improperly collected data from young users. It’s unclear how much data this might be, but there’s reason to believe it could be a lot. For many kids, YouTube has replaced television; depending on how parents use online platforms, children could begin to amass data even before birth. Lear...

Six months of 2019 are on the books already, and certainly there have been six months' worth of data breaches, supply chain manipulations, state-backed hacking campaigns, and harbingers of cyberwar to show for it. But the hallmark of 2019, perhaps, is feeling like the worst is yet to come. Ransomware is an ever-growing threat, corporate and US government security is still a mess, and geopolitical...

Stalkers have ways of tracking you even without fancy malware, airport facial recognition is becoming more common, and WIRED has some advice on how to take the very best fireworks photos. 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 Headlines Opting out of facial recognition at the airport isn't e...

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I handed my iPhone to my wife and asked her to help with with a privacy experiment. She would use my handset to track my location for the next few days, and with only the software I already had installed. Like a lot of couples, my wife and I know each other's phone PINs. So I left her with the device as I walked into our bathroom to take a shower, simulating an o...

Ransomware has no shortage of cautionary tales and wakeup calls from the past decade. But for local governments, this past year has been a particularly brutal reminder of the threat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we approach the July 4 holiday, the security world had no shortage of fireworks—starting with a hacker group, likely from China, that has spent years breaking into carriers in an effort to hoover up metadata from prime targets. Russia gets most of the attention lately, but never count out China's sophistication and verve. Also never count out Excel as a popular target for hackers. Learn more ab...

In a weeks-long stretch in 2014, hackers stole thousands of dollars a day in cryptocurrency from owners. In 2017, internet outages cropped up around the United States for hours. Last year, Google Cloud suffered hours of disruptions. Earlier this month, a large swath of European mobile data was rerouted through the state-backed China Telecom. And on Monday, websites and services around the world—in...

On February 22, cybersecurity researcher Filippo Cavallarin told Apple that he had found a bug in macOS. Left unchecked, the vulnerability could let malware slip past the operating system’s Gatekeeper security feature ndetected. According to Cavallarin, Apple said it would fix the problem by mid-May. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You probably think of Microsoft's classic spreadsheet program Excel as mostly boring. Sure, it can wrangle data, but it's not exactly Apex Legends. For hackers, though, it's a lot of fun. Like the rest of the Office 365 suite, attackers often manipulate Excel to launch their digital strikes. And two recent findings demonstrate how the program's own legitimate features can be used against it. Learn...

Like many people, I use Venmo to pay for stuff: to split the check at dinner, to send my roommate my portion of the utility bills each month, to reimburse friends for concert tickets. It's a useful app for sending and receiving money, regardless of who you bank with. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Dan Salmon is a masters graduate from Minnesota State University who specializes in information security. Learn...

For anyone who's worried that their phone might be hacked to track their location, who they call and when, and other metadata that describes the intimate details of their life, one cyberespionage group has provided a reminder that hackers don't necessarily even need to reach out to your device to gain that access. It may be far easier and more efficient for sophisticated stalkers to penetrate a mo...

According to recent polling, Americans view malicious cyber activity as their top security concern—ahead of the economy, nuclear threats, and ISIL. This fear is well-justified. Within the last couple of years, there have been cyberattacks in the United States against the electoral system, the financial industry, the power grid, and hospitals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

When two countries begin to threaten war in 2019, it's a safe bet that they've already been hacking each other's networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The week began with a tricky Google Calendar phishing scam, and ended with Iran ramping up its cyberattacks against the US, as talk of war with that nation mounts. That, as they say, escalated quickly. Before things took a turn for the geopolitical, we walked you through a dead simple way to stop data breaches with... database encryption. We explained why Google is getting retro when it comes to w...

In 2013, Amy Krekelberg received an unsettling notice from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources: An employee had abused his access to a government driver’s license database and snooped on thousands of people in the state, mostly women. Krekelberg learned that she was one of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Certain studies require sensitive datasets: the relationship between nutritious school lunch and student health, the effectiveness of salary equity initiatives, and so on. Valuable insights require navigating a minefield of private, personal information. Now, after years of work, cryptographers and data scientists at Google have come up with a technique to enable this "multi-party computation" wit...

Not so long ago, companies that cracked personal devices on behalf of governments did so in secret, closely guarding even the descriptions of their capabilities. Now, it seems, they proudly tweet about their updated abilities to hack into new iPhones, like a video game firm offering an expansion pack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At this point, you're probably keeping an eye out for possible phishing messages in your email. You know the drill: If you have any doubts, don't click links or download attachments. That's difficult enough to adhere to in practice. Now, thanks to new findings from the threat intelligence firm Kaspersky, along with phishing texts, phishing tweets, and phishing pop-ups, you need to worry about one...

Data breaches and exposures have been so rampant over the last few years that it's difficult to even keep track at this point, much less step back to mull a solution. But, perhaps out of necessity, researchers from the database giant MongoDB have spent the last two years developing a new database encryption scheme aimed squarely at reducing these damaging incidents. Their secret weapon? Radical si...