Security, Spoken

Five days ago, the internet had a conniption. In broad patches around the globe, YouTube sputtered. Shopify stores shut down. Snapchat blinked out. And millions of people couldn’t access their Gmail accounts. The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered an prolonged outage—which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

The Russian meddling that rocked the 2016 United States presidential election gave the public a full view of something election officials and advocates have warned about for years: weak voting infrastructure and election systems around the US, and a lack of political will and funding to strengthen them. Two and a half years later, real progress has been made in key areas. But with a new presidenti...

Campaign finance laws prohibit businesses and even many nonprofits from directly contributing to political campaigns. They can’t even send pizza. Now, the United States Federal Election Commission may apply the same laws to block a cybersecurity firm from offering free or low cost defense services to campaigns, at a time when those protections are badly needed. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the company debuted a slew of products and services, including a new Mac Pro that's part raw computing power, part cheese grater. But one new feature, mentioned in passing, could have an outsized impact on user security and privacy for years to come. Apple now has its own single-sign-on scheme—and it's a major reimagining of how such a mechanis...

When Apple executive Craig Federighi described a new location-tracking feature for Apple devices at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote Monday, it sounded—to the sufficiently paranoid, at least—like both a physical security innovation and a potential privacy disaster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple (the company) is rolling out a new sign-on feature, the Big Apple (the city) is pushing a groundbreaking privacy law, and Hot Wheels cars are being put to the test. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines New York is set to pass a landmark privacy law Just last week, California passed a historic privacy bill that gave people the power to know how their dat...

Two hours into his keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer's Conference last June, senior vice president Craig Federighi revealed a new privacy feature in MacOS Mojave that forces applications to ask the user if they want to "allow" or "deny" any request to access sensitive components and data, including the camera or microphone, messages, and browsing history. The audience dutifully applauded. Lea...

In 1999, Apple released a slew of new features with Mac OS 9, calling it "the best internet operating system ever." The idea was to unlock the full potential of the turquoise plastic iMac G3—the Internet Mac!—released in 1998. But 12-year-old Joshua Hill didn't have an iMac. To take advantage of all the new connectivity from his parents' mid-'90s Mac Performa, he needed a modem that would plug int...

Returning to work after a long weekend is always rough—especially if you have to deal with a looming worm attack or yet another disinformation operation on your networks! Which was the case in the security world this week. Despite dire warnings and an urgent update issued from Microsoft, customers are taking too long to patch a critical vulnerability that still remains in approximately 900,000 Win...

One of the most difficult things about detecting manipulated photos, or "deepfakes," is that digital photo files aren't coded to be tamper-evident. But researchers from New York University's Tandon School of Engineering are starting to develop strategies that make it easier to tell if a photo has been altered, opening up a potential new front in the war on fakery. Learn more about your ad choices....

Two weeks have passed since Microsoft warned users about a critical vulnerability in a common Windows protocol that could enable a hacker to remotely take over machines without even a click from their owners, potentially allowing an infectious worm to rip through millions of PCs. That bug might be fading from the headlines, but it still lingers in at least 900,000 computers. Learn more about your...

After years of issues with rogue Chrome extensions, hijacks, and malware, Google announced a slew of new policies Thursday to ensure the little browser applets are secure. The improvements come as part of a wider company push to evaluate how much user data third-party applications can access. Google launched the audit, known as Project Strobe, in October alongside an announcement that Google+ had...

Last August, researchers from the threat intelligence firm FireEye uncovered a vast social media influence campaign, conducted by a network of inauthentic news outlets and fake personas with ties to Iran. Their findings were a stark reminder that these kinds of tactics aren't limited to Russia. Now FireEye has published a sequel of sorts, documenting the evolving methods of disinformation actors a...

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...