Security, Spoken

Happy Valentine’s Day! Since it’s 2019, you and a partner could celebrate by installing an app on your phone that lets you control a vibrator your partner discreetly wears in their underwear all day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two weeks out from the longest government shutdown in United States history—and with the possibility of another still looming—government employees are still scrambling to mitigate impacts on federal cybersecurity defenses. And the stakes are high. Furloughed cybersecurity employees returned to expired software licenses and web encryption certificates, colleagues burned out from working on skeleton...

Despite concerted efforts by tech giants to cut back on abhorrent behavior on their platforms, a new survey finds that severe forms of online hate and harassment, including stalking and physical threats, may be on the rise. According to the survey, released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one third of Americans reported experiencing some type of severe online hate or harassment...

The world’s internet infrastructure has no central authority. To keep it working, everyone needs to rely on everyone else. As a result, the global patchwork of undersea cables, satellites, and other technologies that connect the world often ignores the national borders on a map. To stay online, many countries must rely on equipment outside their own confines and control. Learn more about your ad c...

The fleets of electric scooters that have inundated cities are alarming enough as is. Now add cybersercurity concerns to the list: Researchers from the mobile security firm Zimperium are warning that Xiaomi’s popular M365 scooter model has a worrying bug. The flaw could allow an attacker to remotely take over any of the scooters to control crucial things like, ahem, acceleration and braking. Learn...

Three of the Senate’s biggest privacy advocates are sending letters to Facebook, Google, and Apple executives Thursday, following a recent TechCrunch report that Facebook used an iOS and Android app to monitor the phones of users as young as 13 years old. The app, called Research and sometimes referred to as Project Atlas, gave Facebook complete visibility into users' app activity, web searches, e...

It's frankly hard, at the end of this long week, to devote much mental energy to any news that's not Jeff Bezos going to war with the National Enquirer, but stay with us! There's a lot going on—including some intriguing developments in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. Before we get too far into it, though, please take a moment to update to iOS 12.1.4, which fixes that very bad FaceTime grou...

One of the easiest ways to protect your privacy and security on a smartphone is set a passcode or biometric lock to enable disk encryption. That way if your phone gets lost or stolen, no one can take data off the device in a readable form. But not all smartphones—and tablets, and smartwatches, and so on—offer that protection. They don’t have the processing power to deal with resource-intensive enc...

Since the world learned of state-sponsored campaigns to spread disinformation on social media and sway the 2016 election, Twitter has scrambled to rein in the bots and trolls polluting its platform. But when it comes to the larger problem of automated accounts on Twitter designed to spread spam and scams, inflate follower counts, and game trending topics, one study argues that the company still is...

On a frigid morning in Washington, DC, last week, four staffers from the United States Census Bureau stood shoulder to shoulder on a stage, smiling widely as they soaked in the whoops, whistles, and eager applause from the crowd seated before them. The Esri Federal GIS Conference, an annual event where government employees gather to talk about mapping technology, isn’t exactly what you’d call a ro...

Data breaches that compromise people's usernames and passwords have become so common, and used in crime for so long, that millions of stolen credential pairs have actually become practically worthless to criminals, circulating online for free. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the more current credentials sold on the black market. All of this means that it's increasingly diffic...

As happens infrequently—but definitely not never—Apple wrestled with an embarrassing and problematic security bug this week in its iOS FaceTime group calling feature. The flaw was bad enough that Apple took the drastic step of pulling group FaceTime functionality altogether. A full fix will come next week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more into a gargantuan, unprecedented collection of 2. Learn mor...

For the past three years, Facebook has paid consumers as young as 13 to download a “Facebook Research” application that gives the company wide-ranging access to their mobile devices, according to a TechCrunch investigation published Tuesday. In order to allow people with iPhones to participate, Facebook sidestepped the strict privacy rules imposed by Apple in its App Store by taking advantage of a...

For years, critics have taken aim at Facebook's privacy missteps, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to this week's revelation that Facebook has paid people—including minors—to let it spy on all of their online activity, potentially even including their encrypted private messages. Which makes it a potentially very big deal that over the last several weeks, the company has quietly hired three pro...

At its annual worldwide threat assessment hearing on Tuesday, top national security officials gave the Senate Intelligence Committee a rundown from top intelligence officials of the dangers the United States will face in 2019 and beyond. The adversaries were familiar, with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran mentioned alongside evolving situations like Brexit and the power struggle in Venezuela....

In September, members of Google's Chrome security team put forth a radical proposal: Kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren't actually advocating a change to the web's underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you're looking at, so that you don't have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has spru...

It’s often hard to tell just how seriously to take reports of a new vulnerability. The jargon is inscrutable, and the skills needed to pull off the attacks are possessed only by highly skilled professionals. But a bug afflicting Apple’s FaceTime chat has no such ambiguity. How bad is it? Rather than risk exposing people to it, Apple pulled the plug on FaceTime group chats altogether. Learn more ab...

Technology has never limited its effects to those its creators intended: It disrupts, reshapes, and backfires. And even as innovation's unintended consequences have accelerated in the 21st century, tech firms have often relegated the thinking about its second-order effects to science fiction and the occasional embarrassing congressional hearing, scrambling to prevent unexpected abuses only after t...

In an effort led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has plans to rearchitect WhatsApp, Instagram direct messages, and Facebook Messenger so that messages can travel across any of the platforms. The New York Times first reported the move Friday, noting also that Zuckerberg wants the initiative to "incorporate end-to-end encryption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Close observers of Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia have long wondered when, exactly, Roger Stone would be indicted. The answer came Friday, when FBI agents arrested Trump’s longtime friend and advisor on seven counts, including obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering. Garrett Graff breaks down the...

Roger Stone’s pre-dawn arrest in Florida Friday, a raid executed by FBI agents working without salary during the government shutdown, had long seemed a matter of when, not if. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been deeply interested in Stone for months, and at least nine of the political operative’s associates have appeared before Mueller’s grand jury, including talk radio host Randy Credico and...

It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room in a luchador mask he picked up on the family’s ho...

Each January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists greets the new year with a readout of its Doomsday Clock, an allegorical timepiece created in 1947 to illustrate our species’ proximity to the apocalypse. The announcement of the time—with human civilization in its eleventh hour—tends to arrive amid considerable fanfare, especially in these tempestuous times. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Kyle L. Learn mor...

Dozens of Nest camera owners this week heard a disembodied voice insist that they subscribe to PewDiePie's YouTube channel. On Sunday, a voice emanating from a Nest security camera told a family of three that North Korean missiles were en route to Ohio, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In December, a couple was startled out of bed when they heard sexual expletives coming from their baby's room over a mon...