Security, Spoken

It's almost Tax Day, which also means it's peak tax fraud season. The Internal Revenue Service has played some epic games of cat-and-mouse with phone and online scammers over the past 10 years, but the latest scamming trend for 2018 has a particularly devious twist. Here's how it works: Attackers use a taxpayer's stolen identity information to fraudulently file their returns for a refund. They all...

Passports, like any physical ID, can be altered and forged. That's partly why for the last 11 years the United States has put RFID chips in the back panel of its passports, creating so-called e-Passports. The chip stores your passport information—like name, date of birth, passport number, your photo, and even a biometric identifier—for quick, machine-readable border checks. Learn more about your a...

It was the day of the biker rally, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2016, when thousands of motorcyclists descend in a cacophonous blitz on Washington, DC, for the annual Rolling Thunder rally. Soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, wearing a blazer sans tie but with a red MAGA hat firmly ensconced on his head, worked the crowd around the Lincoln Memorial. “Look at all these bi...

In the four or so years since it launched, end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal has become the security community's gold standard for surveillance-resistant communications. Its creators have built an encryption protocol that companies from WhatsApp to Facebook Messenger to Skype have all added to their own products to offer truly private conversations to billions of people. Learn more about y...

It's been nearly eight months since the malware known as NotPetya tore through the internet, rippling out from Ukraine to paralyze companies and government agencies around the world. On Thursday, the White House finally acknowledged that attack. And in a reversal of its often seemingly willful blindness to the threat of Russian hacking, it has called out the Kremlin as NotPetya's creator. Learn mo...

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment against Russia’s Internet Research Agency contains a number of striking moments, from the inflammatory ads bought by the so-called “troll factory” to the rampant identity theft against US citizens. But what stands out most may be the reminder that for Russia, subverting the foundations of US democracy was just another 9 to 5. Learn more about your ad cho...

North Korea's most prolific hacking group, broadly known within the security community under the name Lazarus, has over the last half-decade proven itself one of the world's most internationally aggressive teams of intruders. It has pulled off audacious attacks around the globe, from leaking and destroying Sony Pictures' data to siphoning of tens of millions of dollars from banks in Poland and Ban...

Each new breaking news situation is an opportunity for trolls to grab attention, provoke emotions, and spread propaganda. The Russian government knows this. Fake-news manufacturing teenagers in Macedonia know this. Twitter bot creators know this. And thanks to data-gathering operations from groups like the Alliance for Securing Democracy and RoBhat Labs, the world knows this. Learn more about your...

For some time, there has been a conflation of issues—the hacking and leaking of illegally obtained information versus propaganda and disinformation; cyber-security issues and the hacking of elections systems versus information operations and information warfare; paid advertising versus coercive messaging or psychological operations—when discussing “Russian meddling” in the 2016 US elections. Learn...

Facebook has always nudged truant users back to its platform though emails and notifications. But recently, those prods have evolved beyond comments related to activity on your own profile. Now Facebook will nag you when an acquaintance comments on someone else’s photo, or when a distant family member updates their status. The spamming has even extended to those who sign up for two-factor authenti...

For anyone getting their geopolitical news from the Olympics alone, North Korea might seem practically charismatic. Its combined hockey team with South Korea has become a global symbol of dictator Kim Jong Un's call for improved relations with the South. Kim's sister has led a Pyeongchang charm offensive. And its Stepford cheerleaders—well, some people seem to not be entirely creeped out by them....

This week, reports have percolated that Facebook is testing a new menu item, called "Protect," in its iOS app. The feature sports a blue shield icon, and tapping it redirects you to the App Store listing for Facebook-owned VPN app Onavo Protect. But while Onavo does claim to offer some tools that make the web safer, in practice it falls far short of the privacy protections that VPN users reasonabl...

Facial recognition and machine learning programs have officially been democratized, and of course the internet is using the tech to make porn. As first reported by Motherboard, people are now creating AI-assisted face-swap porn, often featuring a celebrity's face mapped onto a porn star's body, like Gal Gadot's likeness in a clip where she's supposedly sleeping with her stepbrother. Learn more abo...

The rise of cryptojacking—which co-opts your PC or mobile device to illicitly mine cryptocurrency when you visit an infected site—has fueled mining's increasing appeal. But as attackers have expanded their tools to slyly outsource the number of devices, processing power, and electricity powering their mining operations, they've moved beyond the browser in potentially dangerous ways. Learn more abo...

On Tuesday, the heads of the NSA, CIA, FBI, and ODNI—America's intelligence community brain trust—gathered before members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss various worldwide threats. And while most of the topics were familiar, the hearing also included a few revelatory moments, insights into fears that were either detailed or confirmed. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Russian hackers, with hardly a shred of deniability, have targeted the Pyeongchang Olympics for months in retaliation for the country's doping ban, stealing and leaking documents from Olympics-related organizations. Now a more insidious attack has surfaced, one designed not to merely embarrass, but disrupt the opening ceremonies themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.co...

Over the last several years, a number of social media and dating platforms have begun emphasizing users’ real names. Facebook started requiring people sign up with their “authentic” names in 2014. Twitter invited anyone to apply to be “verified”—meaning Twitter certified they were who they claimed—in 2016. In December, OkCupid said it would no longer allow prospective daters to use names like “sex...

This week may have been, perhaps, the closest thing the cybersecurity world can experience to a lull in the digital mayhem. With the exception of one very significant Apple leak—and we'll get to that—hackers kept their breaches, disruptions, and scams close to the baseline. At least, that we know of. One of the most significant news stories of the week was, in fact, a massive law enforcement taked...

When Hurricane Harvey wreaked destruction in Houston last August, the country turned not just to cable television, but also to Snapchat. Two months before the storm, the social media app had debuted Snap Map, a crowdsourced, interactive feature that displays what’s happening on Snapchat around the world. At launch, Snap Map seemed mostly like a fun toy, albeit one with potential privacy implicatio...

It's been roughly two years since the first signs that Russia had launched an interference campaign aimed at the 2016 presidential race, and now the United States is hurtling toward a set of pivotal midterm elections in November. But while some states have made an earnest effort to secure the vote, the overall landscape looks troubling—and in some cases, it's too late to fix it this year. Learn mo...

You don't read privacy policies. And of course, that's because they're not actually written for you, or any of the other billions of people who click to agree to their inscrutable legalese. Instead, like bad poetry and teenagers' diaries, those millions upon millions of words are produced for the benefit of their authors, not readers—the lawyers who wrote those get-out clauses to protect their Sil...

With the rise and fall of dark web black markets like Alphabay and the Silk Road, law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that even anonymity tools like Tor and cryptocurrencies won't hide criminals from the law's long reach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Another week, another death by a thousand leaks, from the operational security failure of fitness app Strava exposing the locations of military bases around the world to Russian hacker group Fancy Bear dropping the latest round of stolen documents from Olympics-related organizations. And then there was that other, congressionally orchestrated release of a certain classified memo, a highly politici...