Security, Spoken

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...

You probably get robocalls all the time. Some pretend to be from the IRS, others come from a phone number very similar to yours. And then there's the rash of free airline tickets/problem with your credit card/complete this short survey intrusions. If it feels like they're cropping up more than ever, you're right. The blocking service YouMail estimates that 2.49 billion robocalls were placed to US...

As many as a million spectators turn out for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Another 200,000 show up the night before to watch the enormous balloons inflate. Keeping New York City safe on an ordinary day is challenging enough; locking down a massive parade route is all the more so. But the New York Police Department has recently deployed a new secret weapon to counter body-worn bombs: A team o...

By now, the name Uber has become practically synonymous with scandal. But this time the company has outdone itself, building a Jenga-style tower of scandals on top of scandals that has only now come crashing down. Not only did the ridesharing service lose control of 57 million people's private information, it also hid that massive breach for more than a year, a cover-up that potentially defied dat...

Well, it’s been a wild and wooly week for security, especially for Face ID, which a group of hackers at a Vietnamese security firm convincingly claim to have broken just a week after the iPhone X release. They’re joined by a 10-year-old boy, who managed to break into his mother’s iPhone X thanks to a little trick known as genetics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoic...

Four months ago, HBO faced a punishing series of leaks of unreleased episodes, scripts, and even celebrities' contact information. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice named the alleged culprit behind that extortion campaign: An Iranian hacker named Behzad Mesri. By indicting Mesri, prosecutors have sent a message that even anonymous cybercriminals in countries as distant as Iran can be tracked d...

We get it. Presidential campaigns are a blur. One day you're kissing babies in an Iowa cornfield, the next you're working the spin room at a Las Vegas debate. Who among us can remember every hand shaken, every appointment kept, every 30-year-old underling plotting a backroom conversation with Vladimir Putin to acquire dirt on a political opponent? Certainly not Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Lear...

WikiLeaks has been sliding into Donald Trump Jr.’s DMs. The mostly one-sided conversation, surfaced by The Atlantic, lasted at least from September 2016 to July 2017. Throughout that stretch, WikiLeaks sent Donald Trump Jr. direct messages through Twitter, asking him for his father's tax returns, suggesting Trump Senior reject election results if Hillary Clinton won, and even oh-so-casually floati...

Five years ago, Benjamin Delpy walked into his room at the President Hotel in Moscow, and found a man dressed in a dark suit with his hands on Delpy's laptop. Just a few minutes earlier, the then 25-year-old French programmer had made a quick trip to the front desk to complain about the room's internet connection. He had arrived two days ahead of a talk he was scheduled to give at a nearby securit...

The United States government doesn't get along with hackers. That's just how it is. Hacking protected systems, even to reveal their weaknesses, is illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the Department of Justice has repeatedly made it clear that it will enforce the law. In the last 18 months, though, a new Department of Defense project called "Hack the Pentagon" has offered real glimm...

The first time the police arrived on her doorstep, in March of 2015, Courtney Allen was elated. She rushed to the door alongside her dogs, a pair of eager Norwegian elkhounds, to greet them. “Is this about our case?” she asked. The police looked at her in confusion. They didn’t know what case she was talking about. Courtney felt her hope give way to a familiar dread. Learn more about your ad choic...