Security, Spoken

After a solid decade of nonstop corporate data breaches and exposures you'd think large organizations would have at least fixed the most basic and obviously damaging types of data mishandling. But there's clearly still a long way to go. On Friday, independent security journalist Brian Krebs revealed that the real estate and title insurance giant First American had 885 million sensitive customer fi...

The Memorial Day weekend begins on a dire note for constitutional protections. On Thursday, the US government indicted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for violating the Espionage Act. This is the first time in modern history that the US has charged the publisher of sensitive materials rather than the person who leaked it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Thursday, the Department of Justice unsealed new charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Unlike the previous indictment—which focused narrowly on an apparent offer to help crack a password—the 17 superseding counts focus instead on alleged violations of the Espionage Act. In doing so, the DOJ has aimed a battering ram at the freedom of the press, whether you think Assange is a journal...

New charges against Julian Assange threaten all of the press, scientists have figured out how to alter emotional memories, and Memorial Day is coming. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines Julian Assange's charges put all of the press at risk New charges unveiled by the Justice Department against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange paint a troublesome picture for...

As facial recognition technologies have evolved from fledgling projects into powerful software platforms, researchers and civil liberties advocates have consistently warned about their potential to erode privacy. Those mounting fears came to a head Wednesday in Congress. Alarms over facial recognition had already gained urgency in recent years, as studies have shown that the systems still produce...

It happened again. Google announced today that it's the latest tech giant to have accidentally stored user passwords unprotected in plaintext. GSuite users, pay attention. Google says that the bug affected "a small percentage of GSuite users," meaning it does not impact individual consumer accounts, but does affect some business and corporate accounts, which have their own risks and sensitivities....

Bluetooth is the invisible glue that binds devices together. Which means that when it has bugs, it affects everything from iPhones and Android devices, to scooters, and even physical authentication keys used to secure other accounts. The order of magnitude can be stunning: The BlueBorne flaw, first disclosed in September 2017, impacted five billion PCs, phones, and IoT units. Learn more about your...

In the three years since Russian operatives breached the servers of the Democratic National Committee and threw presidential politics into a state of perpetual chaos, countries around the world have been on notice to the threat of foreign interference in elections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A decade ago, Amazon abruptly deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of its American customers. The move instantly evoked the “memory holes” in the novel's totalitarian dystopia, and it inspired about equal measures of shock, outrage, and jokes. (If a fictional Amazon in a dystopian novel had performed the same mass deletion, critics would have said it was too on the nose. Learn m...

The week started out with a bang, or several of them really. Remember Meltdown and Spectre, the vulnerabilities that affected basically every Intel processor from the last decade? There’s a related attack called ZombieLoad—yes, ZombieLoad—with similarly broad and bad impact. Serious stuff! But honestly not even the worst disclosure of the week. That distinction probably goes to Cisco. Learn more a...

For decades, the security industry has warned that the cybercriminal economy has been developing its own highly specialized, professional supply chain. But only when law enforcement tears the lid off a well-honed hacker operation—as they did today with the global Goznym malware crew—does the full picture of every interlinked step in that globalized crime network come into focus. Learn more about y...

As part of its expanded anti-phishing and account security measures, Google offers extensive support for physical authentication tokens. In a surprising setback, though, the company announced today that it has discovered a vulnerability in the Bluetooth version of its own Titan Security Key—which pairs to devices through the wireless Bluetooth Low Energy protocol, rather than through NFC or physic...

The Tandberg video-teleconference monitor is sleeker than the average desktop computer but not much bigger. Developed by a Norwegian concern now owned by Cisco Systems, the desktop units—which look like knock-off iMacs, with a handset for dialing—support seamless and, when enabled, classified video-teleconferencing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite high-profile arrests and protocols with clever names, the robocall scourge remains indomitable. Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai teased a new proposal to put a serious dent in the problem. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. On the face of it, Pai’s proposal sounds appealing. It would allow carriers to block robocalls by default, rather than on an opt-in...

This week, Microsoft issued patches for 79 flaws across its platforms and products. One of them merits particular attention: a bug so bad that Microsoft released a fix for it on Windows XP, an operating system it officially abandoned five years ago. There’s maybe no better sign of a vulnerability’s severity; the last time Microsoft bothered to make a Windows XP fix publicly available was a little...

Hackers got into pretty much everything, and Amazon is paying employees to quit. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines A phone call broke Whatsapp The messaging platform WhatsApp is well known for its end-to-end encryption, but recent news calls its security into question. The NSO Group, an Israeli spy firm, injected malware onto targeted phones in order to st...

You've heard the advice a million times. Don't click links in suspicious emails or texts. Don't download shady apps. But a new Financial Times report alleges that the notorious Israeli spy firm NSO Group developed a WhatsApp exploit that could inject malware onto targeted phones—and steal data from them—simply by calling them. The targets didn't need to pick up to be infected, and the calls often...

Your Cisco routers aren't safe, the Supreme Court voted against Apple, and the nostalgic Tomagotchi has returned. Here's the tech news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines Hackers found a way into Cisco devices. Millions of them Everyone uses Cisco routers, including institutions that deal with hypersensitive information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

The hack of health insurance giant Anthem Inc. has loomed large in the public consciousness since it first came to light in 2015—not just as one of the biggest breaches of all time, but also as a potential example of the Chinese government's longstanding cyber espionage campaign. Hackers stole names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers, and employment details from 78 million Anthem cus...

It was a week of notable firsts, although not always welcome ones. Israel responded to a Hamas cyberattack by blowing up the building that apparently housed the responsible hacking group, a new escalation in cyberwar doctrine. Google for the first time lets you limit how long it keeps your data—so go do that. And the CIA became the first intelligence agency to establish an official presence on the...

Thanks to advances in machine learning, computers have gotten really good at identifying what’s in photographs. They started beating humans at the task years ago, and can now even generate fake images that look eerily real. While the technology has come a long way, it’s still not entirely foolproof. In particular, researchers have found that image detection algorithms remain susceptible to a class...

On the dark web drug market Empire this week, business proceeds as usual. "Satisfied customer, will be back," writes one user on the product page of a meth dealer with the handle shardyshardface. "Excellent," reads a plaudit posted by a buyer of the opiate oxycodone. "Bravo," says another for a five-dollar sample of fentanyl, one of 18 reviews posted on the product's profile page in the last week....

Binance is one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges. As of Tuesday, it’s now also the scene of a major cryptocurrency theft. In what the company calls a “large scale security breach,” hackers stole not only 7,000 bitcoin—equivalent to over $40 million—but also some user two-factor authentication codes and API tokens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The First Amendment and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act collided last month when the UK arrested Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on, among other things, a US extradition request for computer crime. He has since been sentenced to 50 weeks in a British prison. For roughly seven years before his arrest, he’d been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, but on April 11, the Ecuadorian government...

The anonymity service Tor has grown in popularity around the world over the last few years, but it has also long been a tool for intelligence agencies and clandestine communications—not to mention endless cat-and-mouse games between law enforcement and criminals. But now, the CIA is staking out a more public presence there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices