Security, Spoken

Google has long struggled with how best to get dozens of Android smartphone manufacturers—and hundreds of carriers—to regularly push out security-focused software updates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since it’s not summer 2017 anymore, you probably haven’t watched the music video for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s hit “Despacito” recently. And that may be just as well. The reigning most-viewed YouTube video was vandalized and then taken off the platform for a few hours on Tuesday morning after hackers infiltrated the account that hosted it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...

Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress Tuesday, and for five hours, senators who appeared to have halting grasp of the company’s intricacies questioned the Facebook CEO on topics ranging from Russia to artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg for the most part gave considered answers to their questions—except when it came to the specifics of how users can control their privacy. That Zuckerberg would...

You know by now that Internet of Things devices like your router are often vulnerable to attack, the industry-wide lack of investment in security leaving the door open to a host of abuses. Worse still, known weaknesses and flaws can hang around for years after their initial discovery. Even decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The relationship between platforms and their users has never been more fraught. To see the evidence, look no further than Congress today, where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify about how his company reportedly mishandled data belonging to up to 87 million people by allowing it to get into the hands of the Trump-affiliated data firm Cambridge Analytica. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Bots have become a great scourge of the internet. Recently, they've flooded government comment systems with fake activism, distorted the national discourse on guns, and launched malicious attacks against the Justice Department. And a new study suggests they're behind the majority of links shared on Twitter, too. A Pew Research report released Monday finds that a whole two-thirds of links to popula...

Next week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress about his company's failure to prevent the data firm Cambridge Analytica from siphoning off information belonging to up to 87 million people, the majority of whom are believed to be Americans. In the lead-up to the hearings, the social network has scrambled to respond to increased scrutiny from journalists and the public over its...

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed for the first time that it is aware of unauthorized cell-site simulators, the surveillance tools often called stingrays or IMSI Catchers, in various parts of Washington DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the aftermath of the Equifax data breach last year that exposed personal information of more than 145 million people, analysis firm Property Claim Services estimated that cyberinsurance would cover roughly $125 million of Equifax’s losses from the incident. It’s uncertain whether Equifax will actually receive that much money; insurance claims can take a long time to investigate, process, and pa...

Bitcoin's blockchain provides inalterable evidence, stored on thousands of computers, of every Bitcoin transaction that's ever taken place. Many of the transactions recorded on that distributed ledger are crimes: Billions of dollars in stolen funds, contraband deals, and paid ransoms sitting in plain sight, yet obscured by unidentifiable Bitcoin addresses and, in many cases, tangles of money laund...

This week, Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks Off 5th, and Lord & Taylor department stores—all owned by The Hudson’s Bay Company—acknowledged a data breach impacting more than five million credit and debit card numbers. The culprits? The same group that's spent the last few years pulling off data heists from Omni Hotels & Resorts, Trump Hotels, Jason’s Deli, Whole Foods, Chipotle: A mysterious group known as...

It's been about six months since cryptojacking exploded, and in that short time the approach has evolved and adapted to initiate illicit cryptocurrency mining in all different ways. Now, Google's taking a stand, announcing Monday that it would begin blocking any Chrome extension submitted to the Web Store that mines cryptocurrency. In July, it will remove existing extensions that currently contain...

After sailing through two friendly Senate hearings—one so uncontroversial that only six senators tops bothered to even show up at any given point in the hour—Lieutenant General Paul Nakasone seems set to for confirmation as the next director of the National Security Agency. That means he'll soon lead not just one agency, but two: the world's most powerful spying operation, the NSA, and the world's...

When Under Armour announced that its nutrition app MyFitnessPal had suffered a data breach impacting the information of roughly 150 million users, things actually didn't seem so bad. Of course, it's never good when personal data ends up online, much less that of so many people, but it seemed like Under Armour had at least taken reasonable precautions. But it turns out Under Armour only sort of got...

Most of the traffic on the web is encrypted. And more websites are adopting basic encryption measures every day. That means that, in theory, eavesdroppers have a hard time seeing whom you're writing to on Gmail or what you're looking up on Wikipedia. But there's a catch. Big sites like Google and Facebook can see what links you click from their services, and use tracking cookies to follow you arou...

After weeks of unrelenting chaos, the cybersecurity world took a little bit of a breather. Well, relatively, anyway. There was still one of the bigger data breaches in recent memory, compliments of UnderArmour. The sportswear company's MyFitnessPal apps suffered a breach of 150 million users' data, including names and passwords. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For over a week, the City of Atlanta has battled a ransomware attack that has caused serious digital disruptions in five of the city's 13 local government departments. The attack has had far-reaching impacts—crippling the court system, keeping residents from paying their water bills, limiting vital communications like sewer infrastructure requests, and pushing the Atlanta Police Department to file...

Nearly three years after a Russian propaganda group infiltrated Facebook and other tech platforms in hopes of seeding chaos in the 2016 US election, Facebook has more fully detailed its plan to protect elections around the world. In a call with reporters Thursday, Facebook executives elaborated on their use of human moderators, third-party fact checkers, and automation to catch fake accounts, fore...

ISIS has long taken full advantage of secure communication tools, and utilized mainstream communication platforms in unexpected ways. Extremist groups even develop their own software at times to tailor things like encrypted messaging to their specific needs. One such project is the clandestine, unfortunately named communication tool MuslimCrypt, which uses an encryption technique called steganogra...

In its latest drumbeat against the cyber activities of Iran, the US government Friday charged nine Iranian hackers with a massive three-year campaign to penetrate and steal more than 31 terabytes of information—totaling more than $3 billion in intellectual property—from more than 300 American and foreign universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As discerning dark web drug dealers and pseudonymous hackers have figured that Bitcoin is not magically private money, many have turned to Monero, a digital coin that promises a far higher degree of anonymity and untraceability baked into its design. But one group of researchers has found that Monero's privacy protections, while better than Bitcoin's, still aren’t the cloak of invisibility they mi...

Wrangling your Facebook privacy settings—fine-tuning what data friends, advertisers, and apps can access—is a slog. The menus are labyrinthine, the wording obtuse. And it turns out that one of them is completely pointless. In fact, it hasn’t worked in years. To be clear: This is not a case of Facebook sneaking one past you, at least not the way you might think. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

After months of silence, Tumblr Friday released a list of 84 usernames and their aliases that it says were connected to "state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda campaigns." It's the first time the company has publicly acknowledged what journalists and researchers have known now for months: Russian trolls also used Tumblr to spread their divisive memes and gifs, reportedly to the tune of hund...

On Thursday, a report from the Daily Beast alleged that the Guccifer 2.0 hacking persona—famous for leaking data stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016—has been linked to a GRU Russian intelligence agent. What appears to have given Guccifer away: The hacker once failed activate a VPN before logging into a social media account. This slip eventually allowed US investigators to link th...

Hard as it is to believe, it was only a week ago that reports first broke—in The Guardian and The Observer, along with The New York Times—that Trump-affiliated data company Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of 50 million unwitting Facebook users to create so-called psychographic political ads. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices