Security, Spoken

Over the course of a roughly 45-minute press conference Monday, President Donald Trump stood beside Russian leader Vladimir Putin both physically and metaphorically. He repeatedly, pointedly declined to acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, contrary to the assessment of every relevant US intelligence agency and a fistful of detailed indictments from special counsel Robert Muelle...

When we met in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like many parents in the United States, Rob Glaser has been thinking a lot lately about how to keep his kids from getting shot in school. Specifically, he’s been thinking of what he can do that doesn’t involve getting into a nasty and endless battle over what he calls “the g-word.” It’s not that Glaser opposes gun control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After four months of relative quiet from the special counsel's office, Robert Mueller Friday indicted a dozen Russians for their role in hacking the DNC, DCCC, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. It's unlikely they'll ever actually get arrested, but it's safe to say we know a lot more about Russian intelligence than we did last week. And speaking of Russian intelligence, this week it...

Three weeks into his new job as commanding officer of Manhattan’s 20th precinct, Captain Timothy J. Malin stared at a map on his computer screen, puzzled. It showed his jurisdiction carved up by streets and parks, with the southern edge encased in an ominous shade of red. For decades, the New York Police Department has used real-time statistics to chart spikes in violence and calibrate police acti...

In some ways, special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for their hacking and attack on the 2016 presidential election is Mueller’s least surprising move yet—but it might also be his single most significant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2010, a suspected cocaine smuggler named John Krokos bought encrypted BlackBerry devices from an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent. That sort of federal subterfuge is par for the course. But in this case, the DEA held onto the encryption keys—meaning that when the government moved on Krokos and his alleged collaborators a few years later, they could read the emails and messages t...

A Wednesday Congressional hearing on the Meltdown and Spectre chip vulnerabilities had all the technobabble and painful misunderstanding you might expect. But the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation also raised an important practical concern: No one informed the US government about the flaws until they were publicly disclosed at the beginning of January. Learn more about your ad choi...

Since March, when news broke that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used a Facebook app to amass data on as many as 87 million people without their consent, the social networking giant has been forced to repeatedly answer for how it has given away user data and who it's given that data to. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last April, while security researcher Patrick Wardle was attending the RSA security conference in San Francisco, a Taiwanese friend who lived in the city asked to meet for coffee, and for his help with what she described as a serious problem: China, she said, was hacking her iPhone. Wardle, a former NSA staffer and a prominent Apple-focused hacker who founded Digita Security, had heard that reques...

Looking back at the first six months of 2018, there haven't been as many government leaks and global ransomware attacks as there were by this time last year, but that's pretty much where the good news ends. Corporate security isn't getting better fast enough, critical infrastructure security hangs in the balance, and state-backed hackers from around the world are getting bolder and more sophistica...

It was a holiday week for July Fourth, but there was still plenty going on in the security world. WIRED took a deep look at a budding partnership between the Army's Cyber Command and the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service group. DDS brings private-sector tech expertise to the government, and this new collaboration adds Army technologists to the mix to work on difficult development challenges for t...

The annual iOS refresh is on the way—Apple has previewed it, beta testers have installed it, and the rest of us should get iOS 12 when iPhones arrive in September. While features such as winking 3-D emoji and screen-time limits for your apps might take much of the attention when the software arrives, iOS 12 is a major step forward in one other crucial area: smartphone security. Learn more about yo...

You probably spend a lot of your day inside apps: catching up on the news, playing music and movies, keeping in touch with friends, racing cartoon characters around a track, and so on. Every once in a while though, it's worth running an audit on these apps to make sure they're not overreaching and going beyond their remit—collecting more data about you and controlling more of your devices than you...

Privacy is a squishy concept, one that constantly evolves with the times—and with changing technologies. Advances in how we store and communicate information shift expectations around what we can keep to ourselves, and what the rest of the world is able to know. The disruption of established privacy norms is nothing new: People were concerned when the postcard came out, for example, because they b...

Every day, companies like Google and Apple wage a constant battle to keep malicious apps out of their marketplaces and off people's phones. And while they do catch a lot of malware before it does any damage, there are always a few nasty infiltrators that manage to sneak by and end up getting downloaded by thousands of consumers. No one wants these mistakes to happen, but when you're a crucial app...

It has been, to be quite honest, a fairly bad week, as far as weeks go. But despite the sustained downbeat news, a few good things managed to happen as well. So we'll start with those. California has passed the strongest digital privacy law in the United States, for starters, which as of 2020 will give customers the right to know what data companies use, and to disallow those companies from sellin...

Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain—I’ll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position—crossed her path. I’ve got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she’d seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he expla...

In March 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a type of National Security Agency bulk monitoring known as "upstream" surveillance. More than three years after the ACLU originally filed the suit, the case is still mired in procedural and bureaucratic limbo. But on Friday, a hearing over one such roadblock in Maryland district court could brin...

California lawmakers unanimously passed a new privacy bill on Thursday that would give residents of the state more control over the information businesses collect on them and impose new penalties on businesses that don’t comply. It is the first law of its kind in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee want Matt Oczkowski, a former employee of the now defunct consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, to answer questions about how his new company, Data Propria, uses consumer data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the current Supreme Court’s longest-serving member, announced his retirement Wednesday, paving the way for Trump to shape the future America’s highest court . Nominated by former President Ronald Reagan in 1987, the 81-year-old justice has served as the crucial swing vote in a number of landmark cases, including rulings that legalized same-sex marriage and preserved aborti...

You've probably never heard of the marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis. But it may well have heard of you. And now there's also a good chance that whatever information the company may possess about you, it recently leaked onto the public internet, available to any hacker who simply knew where to look. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Monday, police in Florida abandoned a pilot program that had put Amazon’s facial recognition powers at their disposal. On Wednesday, representatives from the country’s most powerful technology companies will gather in San Francisco to take a hard look at the industry’s approach to privacy. And on Thursday, the California legislature will vote on a bill that would grant internet users more power...

There are more Wi-Fi devices in active use around the world—roughly 9 billion—than there are human beings. That ubiquity makes protecting Wi-Fi from hackers one of the most important tasks in cybersecurity. Which is why the arrival of next-generation wireless security protocol WPA3 deserves your attention: Not only is it going to keep Wi-Fi connections safer, but also it will help save you from yo...