Security, Spoken

Bloviating conspiracy theorist Alex Jones whispered loudly in the front row with far-right media personality Jack Posobiec. Banned Twitter troll Chuck Johnson sat a few seats down giggling intermittently at who knows what. A man in a black shirt with the words “FBI used toddler for SEX" printed in red block print meandered in and out of the room. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

“Twitter could get us into a war.” That sentence, which appears in Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, about the Trump Administration, has shocked a lot of people. Not me. Because I just wrote a novel in which precisely that same thing happens. And let me tell you: It’s not far-fetched. Of course, we knew that Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, and his predecessor, Reince Priebus, both have tried to g...

A lot of people may find it hard to remember a time before Chrome. But as Google's browser hits its 10th birthday Tuesday, it's worth noting one under-appreciated source of its popularity: how it made the web more secure. Google developers didn't invent every improvement that made Chrome a more secure alternative to established competitors like Internet Explorer and Safari when it debuted. Learn m...

Google's Chrome browser turns 10 today, and in its short life it has introduced a lot of radical changes to the web. From popularizing auto-updates to aggressively promoting HTTPS web encryption, the Chrome security team likes to grapple with big, conceptual problems. That reach and influence can be divisive, though, and as Chrome looks ahead to its next 10 years, the team is mulling its most cont...

There are plenty of lawmakers who know next to nothing about technology. Senator Mark Warner isn't one of them. Long before the Virginia Democrat was sworn into the Senate in 2009, Warner built a career in the venture capital and telecom industries. That background has served the senator well since news broke that Facebook, Google, and Twitter all enabled foreign influence campaigns during the 201...

It may be the end of August, that time when a sticky malaise settles in, but hackers can wreak havoc even during summer vacation. Which is why WIRED’s security writers keep covering the news. Like this story of how Iran set up a global propaganda campaign targeting social media. Issie Lapowski lays out everything we know about the country's 2018 propaganda machine, like how they used fake profile...

In June, privacy advocates celebrated the passage of a historic bill in California that gave residents of that state unprecedented control over how companies use their data. Two months later, the party's over. Lobbying groups and trade associations, including several representing the tech industry, immediately started pushing for a litany of deep changes that they say would make the law easier to...

Attorneys general from 20 states celebrated on Monday when a district court judge in Seattle extended an injunction against the sharing of 3-D printed gun blueprints online. But their victory lap was short-lived. On Tuesday afternoon, Cody Wilson, founder of the open-source gun-printing advocacy group Defense Distributed, announced he would begin selling the blueprints directly to people who want...

It might feel like there's always a new smartphone on the market with next-generation features that make yours obsolete. But no matter how many iterations mobile devices go through, they're in many ways still based on decades-old electronics. In fact, antiquated 20th century telephone tech can be used to carry out decidedly 21st century attacks on many mainstream smartphones. Learn more about your...

The hour of 4 pm Tuesday, potentially one of the most consequential hours in the history of the American presidency, made clear that history books will almost certainly note Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election win with an asterisk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They set up phony news sites with stories ripped from other sources, backing up their state-sponsored agenda. They stole photos for their social media profiles and made up names to catfish unsuspecting victims. They formed an incestuous web of promotion across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, and other platforms. They seemed to have a thing for Bernie Sanders. And then they got caught....

The biggest news in America this week struck like two timed missiles minutes apart on Tuesday afternoon. Though they appear at first blush unrelated to Russia’s hacking of the 2016 US election, they are likely to explode right in the heart of Robert Mueller’s investigation. First. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Thursday, T-Mobile confirmed that some of its customer data was breached in an attack the company discovered on Monday. It's a snappy disclosure timeframe, and the carrier said that no financial data, passwords, or Social Security numbers were compromised in the breach. A relief, right? The problem is the customer data that was potentially exposed: name, billing zip code, email address, account...

My legs were sticking to the vinyl back seat of a NYC cab when I received the email on a Thursday this July. I was running late to an afternoon dentist appointment, and sending messages on Facebook Messenger. Most of the conversations were for a story I was reporting about a Facebook group for sexual assault survivors, which had been overtaken by abusers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

You probably assume that someone can only see what's on your computer screen by looking at it. But a team of researchers has found that they can glean a surprising amount of information about what a monitor displays by listening to and analyzing the unintended, ultrasonic sounds it emits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee was alerted by Lookout, a mobile security firm, about an apparent phishing campaign. Someone had created fake site that looked just like VoteBuilder, a DNC-managed database that contains years' worth of voter information. Were an unsuspecting DNC employee to give the fake site their username and password, a malicious actor could potentially steal sen...

Following more than a year of unrelenting focus on Russian cyber attacks on Silicon Valley giants, Facebook and Twitter announced Tuesday night that they've now also thwarted a network of suspicious accounts that appear to originate in Iran. First, Facebook announced it had taken down 652 pages, groups, and accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

On Tuesday, a trifecta of tech companies announced that they had thwarted what appear to be significant cyberattacks from Russia and Iran. First, Microsoft CEO Brad Smith announced that the company had caught another round of phishing attacks on political groups in the United States, which it attributed to the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear. Then it was Facebook's turn. Learn more about your ad...

It was a perfect sunny summer afternoon in Copenhagen when the world’s largest shipping conglomerate began to lose its mind. The headquarters of A.P. Møller-Maersk sits beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Copenhagen’s harbor. A ship’s mast carrying the Danish flag is planted by the building’s northeastern corner, and six stories of blue-tinted windows look out over the water, facing a doc...

Early Tuesday, Microsoft announced that last week it seized control of six domains owned by the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, also known as APT28. The hackers had used the sites to mount midterm election-related phishing campaigns, similar to those Fancy Bear launched during the 2016 United States election season. It's the most prominent, publicly known effort to proactively identify and thwar...

In late July, a group of high-ranking Facebook executives organized an emergency conference call with reporters across the country. That morning, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained, they had shut down 32 fake pages and accounts that appeared to be coordinating disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

In a move that has shocked career national security officials, President Trump stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance this week, and announced he was considering doing so for a host of others. The move so enraged retired Navy Admiral William McRaven—the man who oversaw the killing of Osama Bin Laden—that he wrote an op-ed telling Trump to revoke his clearance too, in s...

A spate of hacked Instagram accounts. A $220 million lawsuit against AT&T. A bustling underground crime ring. They all have roots in an old problem that has lately found new urgency: SIM card swaps, a scam in which hackers steal your mobile identity—and use it to upend your life. At its most basic level, a SIM swap is when someone convinces your carrier to switch your phone number over to a SIM ca...

For the past week, psychologists all over America have been freaking out. The cause of their agita was an observation by a psychology graduate student from the University of Minnesota named Max Hui Bai. Like many researchers, Bai uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, where individuals sign up to complete simple tasks, such as taking surveys for academics or marketers, and earn a low fee. Learn m...

Imagine someone robs your house. The savvy culprit didn't leave behind fingerprints, shoe prints, or any other discrete, identifying details. Still, police manage to link the crime to a series of burglaries that happened the next town over, because of the criminal's behavior. Each robbery occurred in the same way, and in each case, the perpetrator stole many of the same items. Learn more about you...