Security, Spoken

If you're facing targeted security threats, your problems run deeper than spyware on your devices. You need to check your physical spaces as well—your home, hotel room, office, and so on—for hidden cameras, mics, and other eavesdropping tools that someone may have planted. That means performing regular "technical surveillance counter measures" inspections. In other words? Checking for bugs. Learn...

When you think about online security, you think digital solutions. Install a reputable antivirus program; use end-to-end encryption. But protection can be physical as well. To up your security game, think outside the code with these IRL reinforcements. Tape Over Your Webcam Mark Zuckerberg does it. So does James Comey. And you, too, should also take this high-reward, low-tech security step. Learn...

There are few more toxic practices online than doxing, the distribution of someone's personal information across the internet against their will. It’s all too common, though, deployed regularly and devastatingly as a means to harass and intimidate. The practice is not limited to public—or briefly internet famous—figures either. Anyone can be a victim, at any time. Learn more about your ad choices....

Like any classic hustle, phishing has staying power. The fake emails and texts that lure you into a digital con—Free cruise! Act now!—may not comprise a very technical hack, but the attackers behind them still put a lot of resources and expertise into giving their cons as much authenticity as possible. That’s what makes it so difficult to protect yourself against phishing. You know not to click li...

If the web were an amusement park attraction, you’d have to be 10 feet tall to ride—it's terrifying enough for adults and a funhouse of horrors for kids, from inappropriate content to unkind comment sections to outright predators. And yet! The internet also affords opportunities to learn, to socialize, to create. Besides, at this point trying to keep your kids off of it entirely would be like keep...

Your passwords are a first line of defense against many internet ills, but few people actually treat them that way: Whether it’s leaning on lazy Star Wars references or repeating across all of your accounts—or both—everyone is guilty of multiple password sins. But while they’re an imperfect security solution to begin with, putting in your best effort will provide an immediate security boost. Don’t...

Throughout 2016 and 2017, individuals in Canada, United States, Germany, Norway, United Kingdom, and numerous other countries began to receive suspicious emails. It wasn’t just common spam. These people were chosen. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ronald Deibert (@rondeibert) is professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. The ema...

When North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday, analysts quickly determined that the weapon would be able to reach any target in the continental United States. Further photo and video analysis since, though, indicate that the missile test represents an even greater advance in capabilities than analysts first thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....

The Internet of Things security crisis persists, as billions of inadequately secured webcams, refrigerators, and more flood homes around the world. But IoT security researchers at Microsoft Research have their eye on an even larger problem: the billions of gadgets that already run on simple microcontrollers—small, low-power computers on a single chip—that will gradually gain connectivity over the...

Pretending to be someone you're not in an email has never been quite hard enough—hence phishing, that eternal scourge of internet security. But now one researcher has dug up a new collection of bugs in email programs that in many cases strip away even the existing, imperfect protections against email impersonation, allowing anyone to undetectably spoof a message with no hint at all to the recipien...

Most ad blockers—and there are so, so many of them now—operate roughly the same way, comparing the scripts they encounter on a given site to their whitelist and block list letting the former run and stopping the others. This means they largely share the same drawback, as well; they can’t block what they’ve never seen before. With its latest release, popular ad blocker Ghostery attempts to solve th...

A massive effort to encrypt web traffic over the last few years has made green padlocks and "https" addresses increasingly common; more than half the web now uses internet encryption protocols to keep data protected from prying eyes as it travels back and forth between sites and browsers. But as with any sweeping reform, the progress also comes with some new opportunities for fraud. And phishers a...

A series of leaks has rocked the National Security Agency over the past few years, resulting in digital spy tools strewn across the web that have caused real damage both inside and outside the agency. Many of the breaches have been relatively simple to carry out, often by contractors like the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who employed just a USB drive and some chutzpah. Learn more about your ad ch...

It's been a rough week for a lot of people, but particularly for Apple. On Tuesday, a security researcher tweeted information about a dire bug in the company's macOS High Sierra operating system that allowed anyone being prompted for system user credentials to bypass the authentication by simply typing "root" as the username and leaving the password blank. Apple rushed to push out a necessary upda...

When a company like Apple rushes out a software patch for a critical security bug, it deserves praise for protecting its customers quickly. Except, perhaps, when that patch is so rushed that it's nearly as buggy as the code it was designed to fix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just 17 months after leading chants of “Lock her up” at the Republican National Convention, protesting FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn himself faced the inside of a Washington courtroom Friday morning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You may not realize it, but the cell phone in your pocket creates a time-stamped map of everywhere you go: where you shop, where you receive medical care, and how often you frequent a church, school, or gun range. That's because cell phones automatically connect to the nearest cell phone tower, and by doing so, constantly determine and record the user's location. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Andrew D. Lear...

It's increasingly unremarkable for consumers to use artificial intelligence tools in their daily lives. Machine learning algorithms power your smart assistants, organize your vacation photos, and even analyze your health data. But human beings pick up the slack for those automated technologies more often than you might realize. And that means that real people can sometimes access user data that cu...

The intersection of quantum computing and espionage may feel like a faraway future. But in his latest novel, David Ignatius, Washington’s own John le Carré, tackles just that. The Quantum Spy, out now, revolves around a central theme of spy literature: the race for a new technology, to discover something new that, even if only for a moment, will provide a geopolitical advantage. Learn more about y...

There are hackable security flaws in software. And then there are those that don't even require hacking at all—just a knock on the door, and asking to be let in. Apple's macOS High Sierra has the second kind. On Tuesday, security researchers disclosed a bug that allows anyone a blindingly easy method of breaking that operating system's security protections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

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As you emerge from your turkey-induced coma, take a moment to reflect on the past week in security, which despite the holiday was chock-full of wonderments. From Uber shadiness to Android location-tracking, it was quite the whirlwind. Uber made headlines midweek when it came out that the company had not only been breached a year ago—coughing up the personal info of 57 million users—but paid the ha...

Intelligence agencies have a limited number of trained human analysts looking for undeclared nuclear facilities, or secret military sites, hidden among terabytes of satellite images. But the same sort of deep learning artificial intelligence that enables Google and Facebook to automatically filter images of human faces and cats could also prove invaluable in the world of spy versus spy. Learn more...

When Ahmed Younis first took a job at the State Department in September of 2016, the cross-country commute between his office in Washington, DC and his home in Los Angeles, where his wife and daughter live, seemed worth it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Security researchers have raised the alarm for years about the Intel remote administration feature known as the Management Engine. The platform has a lot of useful features for IT managers, but it requires deep system access that offers a tempting target for attackers; compromising the Management Engine could lead to full control of a given computer. Now, after several research groups have uncover...