Security, Spoken

As the citizens of Hawaii came out of hiding in their bathtubs and basements Saturday morning, after learning that the emergency alert they had received, warning of an imminent nuclear missile attack, was a false alarm, their fear and panic transformed into rage. "I'm extremely angry right now. People should lose their jobs if this was an error," Hawaii State Representative Matt Lopresti told CNN....

In the early days of 2018, the engineering team at the mobile services company Branch noticed slowdowns and errors with its Amazon Web Services cloud servers. An unexpected round of AWS server reboots in December had already struck Ian Chan, Branch's director of engineering, as odd. But the server slowdowns a few weeks later presented a more pressing concern. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...

As flying, camera-wielding machines get ever cheaper and more ubiquitous, inventors of anti-drone technologies are marketing every possible idea for protection from hovering eyes in the sky: Drone-spotting radar. Drone-snagging shotgun shells. Anti-drone lasers, falcons, even drone-downing drones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skype has more than 300 million monthly users, making it one of the most popular chat platforms in the world. Now, they'll all be able to benefit from a crucial privacy protection: Microsoft announced Thursday that Skype will offer end-to-end encryption for audio calls, text, and multimedia messages through a feature called Private Conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoi...

On Wednesday, in the wake of Russia's December ban from the 2018 Winter Olympics, a Russia-linked group calling itself "Fancy Bears" published a set of apparently stolen emails. They purportedly belong to officials from the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and third-party groups associated with the organizations. It's not the first time Russia has lashed out at...

When WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption to every conversation for its billion users two years ago, the mobile messaging giant significantly raised the bar for the privacy of digital communications worldwide. But one of the tricky elements of encryption—and even trickier in a group chat setting—has always been ensuring that a secure conversation reaches only the intended audience, rather than som...

In 2013, 18-year-old Tadrae McKenzie robbed a marijuana dealer for $130 worth of pot at a local Taco Bell in Tallahassee, Florida. He and two friends had used BB guns to carry out the crime, which under Florida law constituted robbery with a deadly weapon. McKenzie braced himself to serve the minimum four years in prison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, a pair of vulnerabilities broke basic security for practically all computers. That's not an overstatement. Revelations about Meltdown and Spectre have wreaked digital havoc and left a critical mass of confusion in their wake. Not only are they terrifically complex vulnerabilities, the fixes that do exist have come in patchwork fashion. With most computing devices made in the last two de...

Ads that automatically redirect you from your daily browsing to a flashy sweepstakes have long been an incredibly annoying facet of the internet. But the versions that have evolved on the mobile web are particularly vexing, because they can trap you with a pop-up "notification" and nowhere to go. And a recent surge in these mobile pop-ups, even on reputable sites, has left people more frustrated t...

On a cold Sunday early last month in the small Austrian city of Graz, three young researchers sat down in front of the computers in their homes, and tried to break their most fundamental security protections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not every week that you have a once-in-a-generation security disaster. You know, definitionally. So let’s lead off with Meltdown and Spectre, a pair of attacks that impacts the processors inside most computers today. It’s quite a mess! While technically complicated, Meltdown and Spectre are best understood in terms of scale. Every Intel processor since 1995 is impacted, along with AMD and ARM...

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It might seem like nightmare scenario. A terrorist organization or nefarious nation state decides to derail the global internet by faulting the undersea fiber optic cables that connect the world. These cables, which run along the ocean floor, carry almost all transoceanic digital communication, allowing you to send a Facebook message to a friend in Dubai, or receive an email from your cousin in Au...

Ever since the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, laws requiring voters to show identification when they vote have speckled the nation, popping up in states from Rhode Island to Arizona. Almost as quickly, voting rights advocates have taken states like Texas and Alabama to court, arguing that these laws intentionally discriminate against minority voters. Learn m...

You're sick of hearing this. The exhortations didn't work in 2013 and they're not going to work now. Sure. But the truth is that you need a password manager, and it's worth it to take the time to set one up. At this point, even their shortcomings prove how vital they are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the most basic premises of computer security is isolation: If you run somebody else's sketchy code as an untrusted process on your machine, you should restrict it to its own tightly sealed playpen. Otherwise, it might peer into other processes, or snoop around the computer as a whole. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you have tons of leftovers you put them in Tupperware. When you have an excess of phone calls, you send them to voicemail. And when you have a deluge of junk from a botnet attacking your network, you put all that malicious traffic into a sinkhole. Sinkholing is a technique for manipulating data flow in a network; you redirect traffic from its intended destination to the server of your choosin...

2017 was bananas in lots of ways, and cybersecurity was no exception. Whether critical infrastructure attacks or insecure databases, hacks, breaches, and leaks of unprecedented scale impacted institutions around the world—along with the billions of people who trust them with their data. This list includes incidents disclosed in 2017, but note that some took place earlier. Learn more about your ad...

Think of a country that stifles internet freedom. You might first jump to the oppressive regimes of North Korea, China, or Cuba, where internet access is either forbidden or radically restricted. But in fact, according to a recent study by the non-profit Freedom House, the principles of internet freedom are under attack worldwide—including in the United States. And it's only getting worse. Overt g...

Back in July, WIRED security writer Lily Hay Newman assessed the year in hacks and breaches and found, "the first six months of 2017 have seen an inordinate number of cybersecurity meltdowns. And they weren't just your standard corporate breaches. It's only July, and already there's been viral, state-sponsored ransomware, leaks of spy tools from US intelligence agencies, and full-on campaign hacki...

Cryptojacking, which exploded in popularity this fall, has an ostensibly worthy goal: Use an untapped resource to create an alternative revenue stream for games or media sites, and reduce reliance on ads. It works by embedding a JavaScript component in a website that can leverage a visiting device's processing power to mine a cryptocurrency (usually Monero). Each visitor might only do a tiny bit o...

Not so long ago, the internet often felt like a fully detached realm of ephemeral fun. Today, we wake up to tweets from a president that seem intended to goad a rogue state into nuclear war. Hackers launch ransomware worms that tear across the globe in a matter of hours, paralyzing massive multinational infrastructure companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Perhaps you've been hearing strange sounds in your home—ghostly creaks and moans, random Rick Astley tunes, Alexa commands issued in someone else's voice. If so, you haven't necessarily lost your mind. Instead, if you own one of a few models of internet-connected speaker and you've been careless with your network settings, you might be one of thousands of people whose Sonos or Bose devices have be...

In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden famously brought to light a series of classified US government spying programs. For the first time, the American people learned that the NSA was collecting millions of their phone calls and electronic communications—emails, Facebook messages, texts, browsing histories—all without a warrant. Several of the programs Snowden revealed...

Seven months after the WannaCry ransomware ripped across the internet in one of the most damaging hacking operations of all time, the US government has pinned that digital epidemic on North Korea. And while cybersecurity researchers have suspected North Korea's involvement from the start, the Trump administration intends the official charges to carry new diplomatic weight, showing the world that n...