Security, Spoken

This year thankfully avoided any world-breaking ransomware attacks like NotPetya. It even had some small victories, like GitHub beating back the biggest DDoS attack in history. Still, online threats are manifold, lurking and evolving, making the internet a more hostile place than ever. The biggest threats online continued to mirror the biggest threats in the real world, with nation states fighting...

The global conversation around data privacy changed dramatically in March of 2018. That’s when Cambridge Analytica made international headlines. It was the story of a shadowy political firm misappropriating the data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. But really, the story was how Facebook, keeper of 2 billion users' private messages, photos, and social connections, let...

As democracies around the world struggle to hold back the rising tide of authoritarianism, a similar crisis is unfolding online. Three factors converged this year to make 2018 the eighth straight year that global internet freedom declined, according to an annual report from the nonprofit Freedom House: increasing censorship in response to disinformation, the widespread collection of personal data,...

Cybersecurity can feel like a chaotic free-for-all sometimes, but it's not every day that a whole new conceptual type of attack crops up. Over the last 15 months, though, cryptojacking has been exactly that. It's officially everywhere, and it's not going away. The concept of cryptojacking is pretty simple: An attacker finds a way to harness the processing power of computers she doesn't own—or pay...

The week started with bombshell Senate reports on the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. We dived deep to explain how Russians used meme warfare to divide America, why Instagram was the Internet Research Agency’s go-to social media platform for spreading misinformation, and how Russians specifically targeted black Americans in an effort to exploit racial wounds. Learn mo...

The American military is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence, which top officials are convinced will deliver victory in future warfare. But internal Pentagon documents and interviews with senior officials make clear that the Defense Department is reeling from being spurned by a tech giant and struggling to develop a plan that might work in a new sort of battl...

Imagine you’re a burglar. You’ve decided to tackle a high-end luxury apartment, the kind of building with multiple Picassos in the penthouse. You could spend weeks casing the place, studying every resident’s schedule, analyzing the lock on every door. You could dig through trash for hints about which units have alarms, run through every permutation of what the codes might be. That’s one way to do...

On Wednesday, the security and anti-phishing firm Area 1 published details of a breach that compromised one of the European Union's diplomatic communication channels for three years. The perpetrators also compromised systems related to the United Nations, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and a number of international foreign affairs ministries. Learn more...

Phishing scams often come in waves. Last year it was a phony Google Docs link and a convincing Netflix impersonator, both of which had plagued the internet sporadically for months, at least, before seeing big surges. This month, it's a bogus Apple App Store email that convinces its victims to cough up all kinds of personal information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...

The contrast could hardly be more striking. In October, Vice President Mike Pence delivered ablistering speechaccusing China of stealing prized US technology and military hardware. Barely two weeks later, one of Beijing’s most powerful bureaucrats touched down in Israel for a visit focused onbuilding tieswith its tech and innovation sectors. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Scott Moore is Director of the Penn...

For many women, especially journalists, politicians, and other public figures, Twitter is something to endure. Many have accounts out of professional necessity, but the cost of their participation in Twitter discourse is often abuse, threats, and harassment. Women learn to block, mute, report, and ignore their mentions. Some tweet directly at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, frustrated that he seems never...

In May, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement, negotiated by the Obama Administration, designed to keep Iran from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons. As part of that reversal, the Trump administration reimposed economic sanctions on Iran. From the start, the US actions stoked tensions and fear of Iranian retaliation in cyberspac...

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If you thought you were going to make it out of 2018 without a couple more data slip-ups, think again! Two incidents bookended the week. Monday, Google revealed that a bug in its somehow still alive Google+ social network exposed the data of 52.5 million users. That's orders of magnitude bigger than the 500,000 users that were impacted by a previous Google+ exposure. And on Friday, Facebook announ...

If you haven’t heard, 2018 was extremely bad for Facebook. The company was rocked by so many scandals that it’s become hard to list them all in one place. I won’t try here, but I will say it’s equally difficult to determine how much those missteps really matter to Facebook’s billions of users. During a one-day event in New York City on Thursday, the social network got a chance to find out. Learn m...

In offices and universities all across the country Thursday, the same threat appeared in email inboxes: Pay $20,000 worth of bitcoin, or a bomb will detonate in your building. Police departments sent out alerts. Workers from Los Angeles to Raleigh, North Carolina, evacuated their cubicles in the middle of the day. All over Twitter, people posted screenshots of the emails, many different versions o...

This has not been Facebook's proudest year for privacy and security. The company faced the massive Cambridge Analytica data misuse and abuse scandal in April and beyond. It also disclosed its first data breach in October, which compromised information from 30 million accounts. But Facebook has at least one security-focused bright spot it can point to in 2018: its bug bounty. Bug bounties are progr...

The massive data breach that affected 500 million Marriott customers feels like a recent event, given that the company just discovered and disclosed it over the last four months. But it's important to remember that the attack began much earlier, especially as Reuters and others have reported that state-sponsored Chinese hackers were behind it. If that attribution holds up, China's broader hacking...

We are deep into the worst case scenarios. But as new sentencing memos for Trump associates Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen make all too clear, the only remaining question is how bad does the actual worst case scenario get? The potential innocent explanations for Donald Trump’s behavior over the last two years have been steadily stripped away, piece by piece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

In October, Google dramatically announced that it would shut down Google+ in August 2019, because the company had discovered through an internal audit (and a simultaneous Wall Street Journal exposé) that a bug in Google+ had exposed 500,000 users' data for about three years. Maybe it should have pulled the plug sooner. On Monday, Google announced that an additional bug in a Google+ API, part of a...

Nearly after a month after the midterm elections, details on a hack of the Republican National Congressional Committee reveals that meddling in the midterms was much worse than it seemed on election day. The hack probably should have been the biggest news of the week, but for a little distracting—and important!—thing called the Mueller probe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

Australia's parliament passed controversial legislation on Thursday that will allow the country's intelligence and law enforcement agencies to demand access to end-to-end encrypted digital communications. This means that Australian authorities will be able to compel tech companies like Facebook and Apple to make backdoors in their secure messaging platforms, including WhatsApp and iMessage. Learn...

I first came across the imposter Facebook page by accident. The page was made to look like that of my employer, Vietnam Veterans of America, complete with our organization's registered trademark and name. As an Iraq veteran and the office’s designated millennial policy guy, I was helping run VVA's social media accounts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As the founder and director of a nonprofit animal shelter on the East Coast, Alana has spent most of the past decade caring for pets that might otherwise be euthanized. Her work also resonates with people online—the Facebook page for the shelter has more than 1.3 million followers. But in August, she noticed something strange: A series of unfamiliar posts began appearing on the page, and no one at...

Though sporadic hacker intrusions and phishing campaigns targeted political entities in the lead-up to November's midterm elections, things seemed pretty quiet overall on the election-meddling front in the US. Certainly no leaks or theatrics rose to the level of Russia's actions during the 2016 presidential election. But a belatedly revealed breach of the National Republican Congressional Committe...