Security, Spoken

A little over a month ago, the White House forced out Tom Bossert, its cybersecurity czar. A week later, cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce said he would depart as well. And now, rather than replace either, the Trump administration will do without anyone at the helm of its cybersecurity policy. It couldn’t have picked a worse time. The news that the newly appointed national security adviser John...

The ubiquitous email encryption schemes PGP and S/MIME are vulnerable to attack, according to a group of German and Belgian researchers who posted their findings on Monday. The weakness could allow a hacker to expose plaintext versions of encrypted messages—a nightmare scenario for users who rely on encrypted email to protect their privacy, security, and safety. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Earlier this week, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released roughly 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm. Among them: Ads purchased in May of 2016 that promoted a suspicious Chrome extension that gained wide access to the Facebook accounts and web browsing behavior of those who installed it. Learn more about yo...

This week, the United States officially backed out of the Iran nuclear deal. The geopolitical reverberations should continue to play out in a variety of fields, but make sure you count cybersecurity among them. Iran targeted the US frequently—particularly financial institutions before the deal went into place. Security experts warn that with the agreement no longer in place, the barrage could begi...

For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating more than 170 million cameras so far. In a December test of the dragnet in Guiyang, a city of 4.3 million people in southwest China, a BBC reporter was flagged for arrest within seven minutes of police adding his headshot to a facial...

When the US last tightened its sanctions against Iran in 2012, then-president Barack Obama boasted that they were "virtually grinding the Iranian economy to a halt." Iran fired back with one of the broadest series of cyberattacks ever to target the US, bombarding practically every major American bank with months intermittent distributed denial of service attacks that pummeled their websites with j...

The week started with a figurative bang, as a list of questions Robert Mueller's team have for Trump leaked to The New York Times. They all point to one inevitable conclusion: That Mueller almost certainly already knows how all of this ends. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's important to proactively secure your social media accounts, especially since you never know when an innocuous mistake could put you at risk. But it isn't just a theoretical threat. Pranksters, vandals, and malicious attackers all look for ways to get into any legitimate account they can. So while you don't need to hide in a hole, there are some worthwhile (and easy!) steps you can take to kee...

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On Thursday, Twitter chief technology officer Parag Agrawal disclosed in a blog post that the company had inadvertently recorded user passwords, in plaintext, in an internal system. This is not how things are supposed to go! And while Twitter has fixed the bug, and doesn't think any of the exposed passwords were accessed in any way, you should still change your Twitter password right now to make s...

Nearly four years have passed since researchers began to experiment with a hacking technique known as "Rowhammer," which breaks practically every security model of a computer by manipulating the physical electric charge in memory chips to corrupt data in unexpected ways. Since that attack exploits the most fundamental properties of computer hardware, no software patch can fully fix it. And now, fo...

You would think that after decades of analyzing and fighting email spam, there'd be a fix by now for the internet's oldest hustle—the Nigerian Prince scam. There's generally more awareness that a West African noble demanding $1,000 in order to send you millions is a scam, but the underlying logic of these “pay a little, get a lot” schemes, also known as 419 fraud, still ensnares a ton of people. L...

Cambridge Analytica, the embattled data firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, has told employees it is shutting down, along with its UK counterpart SCL Elections. The move, which impacts all offices of both companies worldwide, comes amid recent revelations that the company harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent, according to multipl...

The beginning of May marks the longest period of public silence from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team since his first charges last October—more than two months without any new plea deals, fresh indictments, or publicly “flipped” witnesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Republican majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released an over 250-page report Friday outlining its months-long investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The full report, the key findings of which were published in March, finds that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

Walking the enormous exhibition halls at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, you could have easily gotten the impression that digital defense was a solved problem. Amidst branded t-shirts and water bottles, each booth hawked software and hardware that promised impenetrable defenses and peace of mind. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

WIRED tackled the big questions in security this week, starting with maybe the biggest: Why do so many people use "dragon" as their password? The answer actually says a lot about the psychology of passwords, and how those popular password lists are made in the first place. And there's a whole lot more. Another surprising discovery? Why it makes at least some sense that Atlanta paid $2.6 million to...

This week, MSNBC host Joy Reid has found herself embroiled in a familiar controversy. Twitter user @Jamie_Maz—for the second time—surfaced a number of homophobic posts, from the early aughts, on Reid's now defunct blog, the Reid Report. In response, Reid has turned to a recognizable scapegoat: hackers. Reid isn't the first public figure to blame hackers for her alleged misdeeds online. Learn more...

In February, the ACLU of Massachusetts released a damning report detailing prejudice in social media surveillance efforts by the Boston Police Department (BPD). The report revealed that between 2014 and 2016, the BPD had tracked keywords on Facebook and Twitter in an effort to identify potential terrorist threats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you haven't read this month's WIRED cover story about teen hackers who went too deep into Microsoft Xbox's systems, make that your first stop. In more current news, the White House sent mixed messages on cybersecurity policy this week, calling out Russian hackers for compromising popular routers and firewalls—a problematic, but unsurprising and even popular type of attack. Meanwhile, the White...

It's important not to overstate the security risks of the Amazon Echo and other so-called smart speakers. They're useful, fun, and generally have well thought-out privacy protections. Then again, putting a mic in your home naturally invites questions over whether it can be used for eavesdropping—which is why researchers at the security firm Checkmarx started fiddling with Alexa, to see if they cou...

In 2003, Finnish security researcher Tomi Tuominen was attending a security conference in Berlin when a friend's laptop, containing sensitive data, was stolen from his hotel room. The theft was a mystery: The staff of the upscale Alexanderplatz Radisson had no clues to offer, the door showed no signs of forced entry, and the electronic log of the door's keycard lock—a common RFID card reader sold...

On December 2, 2015, a man named Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on employees of the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and injuring 22 during what was supposed to be a staff meeting and holiday celebration. The shooters were tracked down and killed later in the day, and FBI agents wasted no time trying to understand the motiva...

The City of Atlanta spent more than $2.6 million on emergency efforts to respond to a ransomware attack that destabilized municipal operations last month. Attackers, who infected the city's systems with the pernicious SamSam malware, asked for a ransom of roughly $50,000 worth of bitcoin. (The exact value has fluctuated due to bitcoin's volatility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...

On Tuesday, about 250 people gathered in the event space of Cloudflare's San Francisco headquarters for an unusual security conference—or, perhaps more accurately, one that aimed to modernize the longstanding tradition in security of creating alternative, transgressive gatherings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices