Security, Spoken

Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 campaign, and its related company, Strategic Communications Laboratories, pilfered data on 50 million Facebook users and secretly kept it, according to two reports in The New York Times and The Guardian. The apparent misuse of Facebook data—and the social media giant's failure to police it—leave both companies with ple...

For the average internet user, Wikipedia operates in the background, its 44 million entries serving as a priceless resource, rarely thought of until you need to know the capital of Azerbaijan. This week, however Wikipedia's volunteer editors and the nonprofit that makes its work possible, the Wikimedia Foundation, suddenly found themselves in the news, tasked once again with providing a ground-lev...

When the blockbuster twin security exploits known as Meltdown and Spectre appeared in early 2018, Mozilla was among the first to respond, retroactively changing several behaviors of Firefox to help prevent them. Both attacks rely on using high-speed timing measurements to detect sensitive information, so somewhat counterintuitively, the patches had to decrease the speed of seemingly mundane comput...

Facebook has never been particularly good at prioritizing your privacy. Your powers its business, after all. But recent revelations that a firm called Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of 50 million unwitting Facebook users in 2015 has created new sense of urgency for those hoping for some modicum of control over their online life. If you ever needed a wake-up call, this is it...

A virtual private network, that core privacy tool that encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it through a faraway server, has always presented a paradox: Sure, it helps you hide from some forms of surveillance, like your internet service provider's snooping and eavesdroppers on your local network. But it leaves you vulnerable to a different, equally powerful spy: Whoever controls the VPN serv...

Signing up for a Facebook account, or any free online service, comes with an implicit bargain: Use it as much as you want—check your News Feed, like a status, poke a friend—and in return, the company will collect your data, and use it to serve you ads both on Facebook and around the web. But what appears to be a simple exchange has become anything but. This is not a screed about deleting your Face...

Arguably the biggest news in security this week was also the strangest; a company barely a year old announced a series of AMD vulnerabilities, giving the chip company only a day or so advance notice before making the results public. And despite the hype, the bugs themselves were of questionable severity. It was almost as hard to make sense of as YouTube's decision to add Wikipedia links to controv...

Hacker Adrian Lamo died at the age of 37, according a Facebook post from his father. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son,” Mario Lamo wrote in a post to the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Facebook Group. The cause of death is not yet known, but a coroner...

In the early morning of September 9, 2016, Bill Moore, CEO of the Austin-based walkie-talkie app company Zello, contacted the Middle East Media Research Institute. He was seeking a copy of a report MEMRI had recently published describing how ISIS members and supporters were using Zello, which allows people to send voice messages to each other in private and also public channels. Moore had learned...

In its first 14 months, the Trump administration has earned a reputation for being soft on the Kremlin, even as the extent of the chaos Russia's hackers and trolls have inflicted online becomes increasingly clear. But more recently, the White House's rhetoric towards Russia has begun to shift. And now the executive branch has not only called out the Kremlin for a broad collection of rogue actions...

In 1995, a bipartisan pair of senators wrote a bill to address growing concerns over minors accessing pornography on the internet. President Bill Clinton would eventually sign the Communications Decency Act in 1996, criminalizing the online transmission of “obscene or indecent” materials to anyone known to be under the age of 18. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February, the top trending video on YouTube wasn’t a news clip about the tragedy but a conspiracy theory video suggesting survivor David Hogg was an actor. The video garnered 200,000 views before YouTube removed it from its platform. Until now, the company hasn’t said much about how it plans to handle the spread of that sort of misinformation moving...

There’s no such thing as the US criminal justice system. There are, instead, thousands of counties across the country, each with their own systems, made up of a diffuse network of sheriffs, court clerks, prosecutors, public defenders, and jail officials who all enforce the rules around who does and doesn’t end up behind bars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were revealed in millions of processors earlier this year, those deep-seated vulnerabilities rattled practically the entire computer industry. Now a group of Israeli researchers is outlining a new set of chip-focused vulnerabilities that, if confirmed, would represent another collection of flaws at the core of computer hardware, this time in a processo...

Distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers use a targeted hose of junk traffic to overwhelm a service or take a server offline, have been a digital menace for decades. But in just the last 18 months, the public picture of DDoS defense has evolved rapidly. In fall 2016, a rash of then-unprecedented attacks caused internet outages and other service disruptions at a series of internet in...

Routers, both the big corporate kind and the small one gathering dust in the corner of your home, have long made an attractive target for hackers. They're always on and connected, often full of unpatched security vulnerabilities, and offer a convenient chokepoint for eavesdropping on all the data you pipe out to the internet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Of all of the tech platforms that Russian trolls infiltrated during the run-up to the 2016 election in the United States, Reddit has been among the least forthcoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In privacy-focused, anti-establishment corners of the internet, going open source can earn you a certain amount of street cred. It signals that you not only have nothing to hide, but also welcome the rest of the world to help make your project better. For Ghostery though, the company that makes Edward Snowden’s recommended ad blocker, publishing all its code on GitHub Thursday also means clearing...

For anyone who has watched the last few years of cat-and-mouse games on the dark web's black markets, the pattern is familiar: A contraband bazaar like the Silk Road attracts thousands of drug dealers and their customers, along with intense scrutiny from police and three-letter agencies. Authorities hunt down its administrators, and tear the site offline in a dramatic takedown—only to find that it...

An elite Russian hacking team, a historic ransomware attack, an espionage group in the Middle East, and countless small time cryptojackers all have one thing in common. Though their methods and objectives vary, they all lean on leaked NSA hacking tool EternalBlue to infiltrate target computers and spread malware across networks. Leaked to the public not quite a year ago, EternalBlue has joined a l...

When the still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers spilled a collection of NSA tools onto the internet in a series of leaks starting in 2016, they offered a rare glimpse into the internal operations of the the world's most advanced and stealthy hackers. But those leaks haven't just let the outside world see into the NSA's secret capabilities. They might also let us see the rest of...

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in United States v. Microsoft, a case that many observers believe could have significant ramifications for how cloud computing and other technology companies interact with the US government. If it were up to the justices themselves, however, those implications would end up being short-lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

Uber faces more potential legal consequences for waiting to make public a major hack until a over a year after it happened. The Pennsylvania Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Uber Monday for violating the state's data breach notification law, which says hacks should be disclosed within a "reasonable" time frame. Uber didn't merely keep quiet about the massive breach; it reportedly paid a $1...

It was a wild west week in security, as GitHub succeeded in surviving the biggest DDoS attack ever (1.35 terabits per second!) and analysts scrutinized the "false flag" techniques Russian hackers have used in their attacks to shift blame and throw off investigators. Researchers found an unexpected method for executing phishing attacks against some "unphishable" Yubikey two-factor authentication to...

For more than a year, Jonathan Albright has served as something of a one-man General Accounting Office for the tech industry. The researcher at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism has dug into the details on how political Twitter trolls manipulate the media, and unearthed an intricate web of conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. Last weekend, while digging through Facebook’s tes...