Security, Spoken

The threat of a nuclear missile strike on United States soil has felt more tangible over the past few years, thanks to North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile testing and oscillating relationships between the two countries. Against that backdrop, President Donald Trump announced plans on Thursday for the next generation of missile defense on land, sea—and in space. Learn more about your a...

The current federal government shutdown, the longest in United States history, is in its fourth week, with no clear path to resolution. With 800,000 federal employees on full or partial leave as a result, cybersecurity experts raised an early alarm about how the shutdown would impact US cybersecurity. Those early concerns have since compounded, and evolved into a mounting crisis. Learn more about...

Stochastic Terrorism n. Acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery. When President Trump tweeted a video of himself body-slamming the CNN logo in 2017, most ­people took it as a stupid joke. For Cesar Sayoc, it may have been a call to arms: Last October the avowed Trump fan allegedly mailed a pipe bomb to CNN headquarters. No one told Sayoc to do it, but the fact tha...

Late Thursday night, Buzzfeed published a report that President Donald Trump instructed his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. If true, it means impeachment can’t be far off. In fact, Trump’s behavior has been so broadly suspect, Garrett Graff argues, that he’s either a Russian agent or the biggest “useful idiot” in history. Or both. In other government news, we took a look...

With Netflix's recent price hike announcement, you may be taking stock of all the streaming accounts you pay for every month. It's no secret that the easiest way to cut down without sacrificing Blue Planet is to share logins with friends, family, or your neighbor's cousin's coworker. The Greatest Generation had party lines, and millennials have communal cord-cutting. No judgment here if you're vol...

As the government shutdown neared the one-month mark, the political landscape shifted under Washington’s feet Thursday night, dramatically and perhaps permanently altering the path of our nation’s politics. BuzzFeed’s duo of Russia probe reporters posted a blockbuster report that President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow Project. Learn more about your a...

The secure messaging app Telegram is significant for two very different reasons. One is that the app is a go-to encrypted communication tool for hundreds of millions of users around the world, particularly those looking to duck government surveillance and censorship in countries like Russia and Iran. The other is that many cryptography experts have cast doubt on the integrity of Telegram's encrypt...

They kept the kids in cages. And Excel spreadsheets. And more than 60 other government files and databases that made it nearly impossible to track the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration while trying to enter the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are breaches, and there are megabreaches, and there’s Equifax. But a newly revealed trove of leaked data tops them all for sheer volume: 772,904,991 million unique email addresses, over 21 million unique passwords, all recently posted to a hacking forum. The data set was first reported by security researcher Troy Hunt, who maintains Have I Been Pwned, a way to search whether your own email o...

Fortnite topped 200 million registered players at the end of 2018, continuing its run of massive growth and dominance in online gaming. But huge platforms also inevitably have huge targets on their backs. Fortnite has already dealt with its share of digital security issues, particularly scams like imposter Android apps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you use social media, you've probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Kate O'Neill is the founder of KO Insights and the author of Tech Humanist and Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces. Instead of joining in, I po...

When the US government shut down on December 21stthere was an overlooked victim: the Violence Against Women Act, which expired the same day. That lapse means that new funds for Department of Justice’s VAWA programs, such as hotlines, shelters, crisis centers, and legal assistance, will not be funded until the law is reauthorized. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Gianmarco Raddi is an MD/PhD candidate at the Un...

Another week, another crypto heist. This time, Ethereum Classic was the target, when hackers stole around $1.1 million worth of coins by taking over 51-percent of the currency’s network. Another familiar blunder came this week when it was revealed that technologically challenged convicted criminal Paul Manafort had yet another problem using basic tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...

Iranian hackers have been busy lately, ramping up an array of targeted attacks across the Middle East and abroad. And a report this week from the threat intelligence firm FireEye details a massive global data-snatching campaign, carried out over the last two years, that the firm has preliminarily linked to Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Heads up, tech companies: If your product appeals to the masses, it likely also holds allure for terrorist groups like ISIS. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Rita Katzis the Executive Director and founder of theSITE Intelligence Group, the world’s leading non-governmental counterterrorism organization specializing in tracking and analyzing the online activity of the global extremist community. Learn more about...

An international group of researchers has developed an algorithmic tool that uses Twitter to automatically predict exactly where you live in a matter of minutes, with more than 90 percent accuracy. It can also predict where you work, where you pray, and other information you might rather keep private, like, say, whether you’ve frequented a certain strip club or gone to rehab. Learn more about your...

Location data is some of the most sensitive, and sought after, information that smartphones generate. And wireless providers are in a unique position to access it all the time. But a Tuesday report from Motherboard shows that carriers don't protect this deeply private information as carefully as consumers might think—especially considering that Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T all pledged to st...

Paul Manafort has a horrible track record when it comes to digital security. The latest reminder came this week, when his defense lawyers failed to sufficiently redact portions of a court filing submitted on Tuesday, responding to Robert Mueller’s claims that Manafort violated his plea agreement with the special counsel by lying to prosecutors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

Over the last several years, Yubico has become close to ubiquitous in the field of hardware authentication. Its YubiKey token can act as a second layer of security for your online accounts, and even let you skip out on using passwords altogether. The only problem? It’s been largely unusable on the iPhone. That’s going to change soon. The upshot: Yubico has received MFi certification, meaning Apple...

Last Friday, just like Punxsutawney Phil, DC District Court judge Beryl Howell emerged from her chambers, saw her shadow, and announced six more months of Bob Mueller. Judge Howell’s extension of Mueller’s grand jury, which was set to expire over the weekend, was widely expected—the special counsel’s office has made clear in recent weeks that it has plenty of unfinished business—but the extension...

You know what they say, the first hacks of January set the tone for the rest of year. (Wait, no one has ever said that.) But with that in mind, we tried to bring you mostly good news this week. First up, we explained why Tor, that wondrous anonymizer, is now easier to use than ever. As the world descends further into digital authoritarianism, anonymity networks like Tor become even more important....

In an extensive series of tweets throughout December, hackers leaked sensitive data from hundreds of German politicians, including members of the European parliament, German parliament, and regional state parliaments. The move reflects an insidious strategy criminals and hacktivists sometimes use to expose and endanger targets by leaking deeply person details about them and their families. The lea...

A year ago today, Intel coordinated with a web of academic and independent researchers to disclose a pair of security vulnerabilities with unprecedented impact. Since then, a core Intel hacking team has worked to help clean up the mess—by creating attacks of their own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You probably know about the digital anonymity service Tor, but for whatever reason you may not actually use it. Maybe between the nodes, traffic rerouting, and special onion URLs it seems too confusing to be worth the effort. In truth, Tor has been relatively accessible for years now, largely because of the Tor Browser, which works almost exactly like a regular browser and does all the complicated...

After years of targeted hacks, epic heists, and run of the mill data breaches you might think that institutions would be getting wise to the importance of strong cybersecurity. It seems 2018 was not the year. Here’s WIRED’s look back at the biggest breaches, data exposures, ransomware attacks, state-sponsored campaigns, and general hacks of the year. Stay safe in 2019. Learn more about your ad cho...