Security, Spoken

Daniel Crowley has a long list of software platforms, computers, and Internet of Things devices that he suspects he could hack. As research director of IBM’s offensive security group X-Force Red, Crawley’s job is to follow his intuition about where digital security risks and threats may be lurking, and expose them so they can be fixed. But so many types of computing devices are vulnerable in so ma...

The National Security Agency develops advanced hacking tools in-house for both offense and defense—which you could probably guess even if some notable examples hadn't leaked in recent years. But on Tuesday at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, the agency chose for the first time demonstrated Ghidra, a refined internal tool that it has chosen to open source. Learn more about your ad choi...

When Google's team of ninja bug-hunting researchers known as Project Zero finds a hackable flaw in somebody else's code, they give the company responsible 90 days to fix it before going public with their findings—patched or not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 2018 midterm elections were hardly a glowing reflection on the state of America’s voting technology. Even after Congress set aside millions of dollars for state election infrastructure last year, voters across the country still waited in hours-long lines to cast their ballots on their precincts’ finicky, outdated voting machines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, is something like Q for the Defense Department. He formerly ran the Strategic Capabilities Office, a secretive military skunkworks designed to figure out how to fight future wars. While there, he helped design swarms of tiny unmanned drones; he helped create Project Maven; and he tried to partner the Defens...

When the lip-syncing app Musical.ly first exploded in popularity nearly four years ago, it was best-known for being a teen sensation. But according to the Federal Trade Commission, the app also illegally collected information from children under the age of 13. The agency announced Wednesday that Musical.ly, now known as TikTok, has agreed to pay a $5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

The bombshells and not-so-surprising surprises, both legal and those just plain embarrassing, come on almost every page of Michael Cohen’s 20 pages of prepared testimony for the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A much-touted two-day summit between Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un failed to reach the finish line Thursday, as talks collapsed and Trump returned to Washington, DC. It’s unclear exactly what unraveled the process; Trump says Kim asked for the lifting of all economic sanctions in exchange for closing the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Complex, while North Korea reportedly...

Like many reporters and editors in DC or New York, I have been yelled at by Michael Cohen. It's been almost a rite of passage for anyone writing about Donald Trump over the past decade. There was no bone too small for his long-time lawyer and fixer to pick when it came to published criticisms of the real estate developer. My turn came in June 2012, when he called to yell at me over an item the mag...

Over the past 18 months, revelations about wireless carriers selling smartphone location data to third parties have forced telecoms to promise reform. Worryingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, these user protections have been slow to actually materialize. Even if carriers shape up, though, an attacker can still track a smartphone's location and snoop on phone calls thanks to newly discovered flaws...

The security world's paranoiacs have long cautioned that if a computer falls into a stranger's hands, it shouldn't be trusted again. Now one company's researchers have demonstrated how, in some cases, that maxim applies just as strongly to a class of machine that never touches your hands in the first place: cloud servers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The breaking news hit a snowy Washington on Wednesday: Newly installed attorney general William Barr appears to be preparing to announce the end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The phony Facebook pages looked just like the real thing. They were designed to mimic pages that service members use to connect. One appeared to be geared toward a large-scale, military exercise in Europe and was populated by a handful of accounts that appeared to be real service members. In reality, both the pages and the accounts were created and operated by researchers at NATO’s Strategic Commu...

The Mueller investigation has lasted so long, it's easy to forget that it'll end at some point. In fact, according to recent reports, it may wrap up as early as next week. But what does that mean exactly? We took a look at seven distinct possibilities, from fizzle to fireworks. As though the border wall "national emergency" wasn't enough to worry about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podc...

If New Yorker writer George Packer hadn’t already taken the title, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe’s new book might be best titled The Unwinding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After years of promises about a physical wall stretching along the United States-Mexico border, president Donald Trump declared a state of emergency last week in an attempt to secure wall funding in spite of Congressional opposition. But physical barriers alone have always been both ineffective and expensive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ten years ago, Roman Dobrokhotov sat down in the front row of a Kremlin auditorium, surrounded by a polite audience of journalists and dignitaries attending a speech by Russia’s then-president Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev was only a few minutes into his address on the importance of the country's constitution—which he had just amended to allow Vladimir Putin to serve as president again—when Dobrokhoto...

On Wednesday, Facebook introduced a new privacy setting for Android users. Previously, if you had Location History turned on, the app could track you in the background. In other words, even if you didn’t have the app open, it knew where you were. Now, you can stop it from doing so. And you should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You may have noticed this happening more and more lately: Online accounts get taken over in droves, but the companies insist that their systems haven't been compromised. It's maddening, but in many cases, technically they're right. The real culprit is a hacker technique known as "credential stuffing." The strategy is pretty straightforward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

The US government averted another shutdown when Donald Trump instead opted to declare a national emergency to fund his border wall dreams—a wall which raises huge privacy and security concerns and will cause more problems than it solves. As the country digested the national emergency, cybersecurity workers were still scrambling to clean up the security nightmare wrought by the longest shutdown in...

In the handwringing post mortem after a hacker breach, the first point of intrusion usually takes the focus: The phishing email that Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's aide accidentally flagged as legit, or the Apache Struts vulnerability that let hackers get access to an Equifax server. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dating is hard enough without the added stress of worrying about your digital safety online. But social media and dating apps are pretty inevitably involved in romance these days—which makes it a shame that so many of them have had security lapses in such a short amount of time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the summer of 2006, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced that he was temporarily handing over power to his brother. Turns out he needed to undergo intestinal surgery. Afterward, an anchor on state-run television read a statement, said to have been written by Castro, attesting that all was well. But there were no photographs of Fidel in recovery, no nine-hour radio address from his hospital bed....

Toward the end of a White House press conference Friday morning, during which President Donald Trump declared a national emergency in order to secure up to $8 billion in funding for a border wall, White House reporter Brian Karem stood to ask the president a single question: “What do you base your facts on?” It was the most clarifying question in an hour-long display that at times felt as hard to...

After weeks—years, really, but lately more urgent—of debate over the Trump administration's proposed wall at the US-Mexico border, Congress will vote on a spending bill Thursday that includes $1.375 billion for 55 miles of border fence construction. President Donald Trump has long sought $5.7 billion for a more comprehensive concrete or steel structure spanning the 2,000 mile border, but has not m...