Security, Spoken

On Friday, Facebook shut down another network of 82 accounts, pages, and groups that have been posing as US and UK citizens since 2016. The network, which Facebook said it discovered a week ago and originated in Iran, spread memes, articles, and other posts about political topics in the US and UK, including race relations, the upcoming midterm election in the US, and the recent confirmation hearin...

Mac malware is more common than Apple generally likes to admit. But a new protection in the company's specialized T2 security chip hints at a sophisticated type of attack that the company may be trying to preempt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A key part of what makes Signal the leading encrypted messaging app is its effort to minimize the amount of data or metadata each message leaves behind. The messages themselves are fully encrypted as they move across Signal's infrastructure, and the service doesn't store logs of information like who sends messages to each other, or when. On Monday, the nonprofit that develops Signal announced a ne...

Police have arrested 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc in connection with 13 explosive devices sent to prominent Democrats and CNN this week. Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed the arrest during a press conference on Friday, while FBI director Christopher Wray detailed how law enforcement officers tracked him down so quickly. Sayoc was arrested Friday outside an AutoZone in Plantation, Florida. Learn...

The most popular video game in the world is Fortnite—which makes Fortnite scams a potentially very profitable endeavor. And while that point may seem obvious, the extent of Fortnite fakes on the web, along with how convincingly they mimic their inspirations, may still surprise you. Fortnite opportunists have plagued the internet since the game’s launch; WIRED has previously looked at the scourge o...

In December, researchers spotted a new family of industrial control malware that had been used in an attack on a Middle Eastern energy plant. Known as Triton, or Trisis, the suite of hacking tools is one of only a handful of known cyberweapons developed specifically to undermine or destroy industrial equipment. Now, new research from security firm FireEye suggests that at least one element of the...

Three days after last Christmas, a 25-year-old Los Angeles man named Tyler Barriss allegedly called police in Wichita, Kansas, and pretended that he’d murdered his father and was holding hostages in a house near the city’s downtown. Barriss thought the house belonged to an avid Call of Duty gamer he wanted to harass, but he was mistaken about the address. (WIRED has published a detailed account of...

It's no secret that President Donald Trump tweets at all hours, and calls friends and advisors late into the night. But a New York Times report indicates that, thanks in part to Trump's use of a personal iPhone, Chinese and Russian spies are listening in on his calls. That other countries would want to spy on Trump should come as no surprise. The US certainly does its share of surveillance on worl...

This week, apparent explosive devices have targeted the mailboxes of former President Barack Obama, former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, philanthropist George Soros, and cable news network CNN. Additional reports of suspicious packages have continued to emerge Wednesday, and the situation is still developing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A cascade of explosive devices and suspicious packages targeting the homes of prominent Democrats and the New York offices of CNN were intercepted Wednesday morning, sending the internet's misinformation machine into a tailspin. Two packages were intercepted en route to the homes of President Barack Obama and former President and First Lady Bill and Hillary Clinton. Another, containing a pipe bomb...

Call it the era of misinformation. Call it a crisis of trust. If you must, call it fake news. The truth is that in 2018, hot-button news events are immediately weaponized online by interested parties, whether that’s foreign actors trying to undermine democracy, local politicians trying to rally their base, spammers trying to make a quick buck, even trolls in it for the old-fashioned lulz—or all of...

I understand that it’s easy to dismiss Tyler Barriss as a monster who should never be granted a platform to tell his own story. He took pleasure in terrorizing strangers with his hoaxes, and his alleged actions—calling authorities in Wichita, Kansas, and pretending that he was holding a family hostage—led to an innocent man being shot dead by police last December. Barriss' reaction to Andrew Finch...

In September 2017, barely two months before Virginians went to the polls to pick a new governor, the state’s board of elections convened an emergency session. The crisis at hand? Touchscreen voting machines. They’d been bought back in the early aughts, when districts across the country, desperate to avoid a repeat of the 2000 “hanging chads” fiasco, decided to go digital. But the new machines were...

On Friday afternoon, the Justice Department announced that Russia and the world’s most interesting catering company continue to attack the United States online—and that Russian Twitter trolls had even defended the efforts of special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year. Prosecutors unsealed a September criminal complaint against Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a 44-year-old Russian woman from St...

The Google Pixel 3 has all the betterments you would expect from a flashy flagship smartphone: great camera, zippy processor, smarter AI. It also, though, comes with an unexpected bonus, one that works so deeply in the background you’ll likely never even know it’s there. The Titan M chip may be small and discreet, but it helps make the Pixel 3 and its beefier sibling, the Pixel 3 XL, among the mos...

When Facebook announced at the end of September that it had suffered a data breach that ultimately affected 30 million accounts, it seemed, perhaps, like the work of sophisticated nation state hackers. But a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests spammers as the culprit instead. That shouldn't make you feel that much better, though, given just how much damage criminals can do with the ki...

In 2013, cybersecurity firm Mandiant published a blockbuster report on a state-sponsored hacking team known as APT1, or Comment Crew. The Chinese group achieved instant infamy, tied to the successful hacks of more than 100 US companies and the exfiltration of hundreds of terabytes of data. They also vanished in the wake of being exposed. Now, years later, researchers from security firm McAfee say...

One nice thing about using web-based services is that you rarely need to take charge. You just sign up for an account, and instantly access your data from anywhere on any device without having to know how the internet works, much less how to configure a server. But that lack of control over the process is also, increasingly, the problem. Companies hold your data on their servers, which means it co...

After two weeks of investigation, Facebook announced additional details on Friday of how attackers carried out a massive breach of the social network that compromised accounts for tens of millions of users. The company downgraded its estimate of how many users had their access tokens stolen from an original estimate of at least 50 million to 30 million—and shed new light on exactly how an attack o...

When you give an organization your data, and then that data gets exposed or stolen, you probably want to know about it. Seems simple enough. If a friend lost your sweater, you'd expect him to tell you. But a seemingly endless parade of massive data exposures—including, most recently, at Facebook and Google—reveal just how complicated that practice of disclosure can be. Learn more about your ad cho...

With the exception of President Trump’s legal team, no one has been watching the Mueller investigation more closely than Garrett Graff. Graff, a historian and journalist, wrote the book on Robert Mueller (literally), has interviewed him probably more than any other journalist, and covers the investigation for WIRED. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The good news: A recent scourge of fake Adobe installers really does update you to the latest version of Flash. The bad news: It places cryptomining malware on your machine in the meantime. The Hack Researchers at Palo Alto Networks this week warned of the latest evolution in both cryptojacking and fake Flash updates, two popular forms of cyber malfeasance united in one unpleasant parcel. Learn mo...

At the end of last month, Facebook made a bombshell disclosure: As many as 90 million of its users may have had their so-called access tokens—which keep you logged into your account, so you don't have to sign in every time—stolen by hackers. Friday, the company put the actual number at 30 million. Here's how to see if you were one of them, and if so, what the hackers got from your account. Learn m...

For years, the Kremlin's increasingly aggressive hackers have reached across the globe to hit targets with everything from simple phishing schemes to worms built from leaked NSA zero day vulnerabilities. Now, law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe have detailed another, far more hands-on tactic: Snooping on Wi-Fi from a vehicle parked a few feet away from a target office—or even from a lapt...

The first step in solving any problem is admitting there is one. But a new report from the US Government Accountability Office finds that the Department of Defense remains in denial about cybersecurity threats to its weapons systems. Specifically, the report concludes that almost all weapons that the DoD tested between 2012 and 2017 have “mission critical” cyber vulnerabilities. Learn more about y...