Security, Spoken

As smartphone users have become more aware that fake cell phone towers, known as IMSI catchers or stingrays, can spy on them, developers have rushed to offer apps that detect when your phone connects to one. Unfortunately, it seems, those tools aren't as effective as they claim. Watching the watchers turns out to be a complicated business. Researchers from Oxford University and the Technical Unive...

Digital privacy has had a very bad summer. As China and Russia move to block virtual private network services, well over a billion people face losing their best chance at circumventing censorship laws. First, China asked telecom companies to start blocking user access to VPNs that didn't pass government muster by next February. More recently, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law to ban VP...

President Trump regularly demonstrates a great capacity for playing fast and loose with the truth. By one calculation, he publicly lied or exaggerated at least once daily during the 40 days following his inauguration. Politicians routinely bend reality or, in some cases, break with it entirely. But there is no precedent for applying such casual disregard to nuclear weapons, as Trump did this week....

One week after hackers spilled multiple episodes of unreleased HBO shows and scripts online, the same group has dropped its second trove of purported internal data from the premium network. And this time it's not just nihilistic Game of Thrones spoilers—there's a ransom note, too. The latest leak includes another half-gigabyte sample of the group's stolen digital goods; it claims to have 1.5 terab...

August is supposed to be a slow news month. People plan summer beach vacations on this presumption. Hackers, though, apparently hate sun and sand because this past week has been incredibly active on the security news front. WIRED broke the scoop of leaked audio from Jared Kushner’s welcome conversation with west wing interns, which revealed he has a less than nuanced grasp of the details of the Pa...

Just three short months ago, security researcher Marcus Hutchins entered the pantheon of hacker heroes for stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack that ripped through the internet and paralyzed hundreds of thousands of computers. Now he's been arrested and charged with involvement in another mass hacking scheme—this time on the wrong side. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com...

Apple recently removed some of the virtual private networks from the App Store in China, making it harder for users there to get around internet censorship. Amazon has capitulated to China's censors as well; The New York Times reported this week that the company's China cloud service instructed local customers to stop using software to circumvent that country's censorship apparatus. Learn more abo...

Most consumer tech manufacturers figure that once a hacker can physically access a device, there's not much left that can be done to defend it. But a group of researchers known as the Exploitee.rs say that giving up too soon leaves devices susceptible to hardware attacks that can lead to bigger problems. Hardware hack techniques, like a flash memory attack they developed, can facilitate the discov...

This weekend, the same email landed in the inboxes of an untold number of entertainment journalists. “1.5 TB of HBO data just leaked!!!” screamed the subject header, while the email itself, addressed "to all mankind," promised “the greatest leak of space era,” and a link to a site that hosts unreleased an Game of Thrones script, not-yet-aired episodes of Ballers and Insecure, Room 104, and Barry....

The near-daily barrage of news and revelations, big and small, about the Trump campaign and its metastasizing ties to Russia can be hard to keep track of, even for people following the scandal closely. Story lines and players appear and disappear, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One out of every seven people on the planet uses the messaging app WhatsApp every day, according a recent blog post from the company. A billion people a day send messages to their friends and family on a service that's end-to-end encrypted by default, up from a billion per month last year. That surge in growth stands in sharp contrast to Twitter, which added approximately no new monthly uses last...

Last week, representative Blake Farenthold of Texas lamented on the radio that some "female senators from the Northeast" stood in the way of repealing the Affordable Care Act. "If it was a guy from south Texas," he said, "I might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style," suggesting he'd love to duel, say, Susan Collins of Maine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

Before my visit earlier this year, I’d never been to Cuba, though Cuba had certainly been to me. The Miami of my ’80s childhood was a suburban reboot of prerevo­lutionary Cuba, filled with people who still toasted El año próximo en La Habana (“next year in Havana”) at important occasions. Everything from family letters to fresh-off-the-raft waiters kept us apprised of the increasingly desperate co...

When AlphaBay, the world’s largest dark web bazaar, went offline two weeks ago, it threw the darknet into chaos as its buyers and sellers scrambled to find new venues. What those dark web users didn't—and couldn't—know: That chaos was planned. Dutch authorities had already seized Hansa, another another major dark web market, the previous month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

It was the week that sent dark web markets scrambling. On Thursday, the feds confirmed earlier reports that they had taken down Alphabay, a dark web bazaar substantially larger than Silk Road ever was. They tacked on a surprising revelation though: Dutch police had a month earlier quietly seized control of the third-largest dark web market, Hansa, setting a trap for displaced Alphabay buyers and s...

The ever-changing Russian hacking scandal—which doesn’t yet have a catchy name like Treasongate but clearly needs one—took a sharp U-Turn back to email territory, when Donald Trump Jr. revealed the email chain in which he set up a meeting with a Russian government lawyer. We profiled the British publicist who organized the get-together, a guy who has had a long and colorful relationship with the T...

Not since the days of the now-legendary Silk Road has a single site dominated the dark web's black market as completely, and for as long, as the online bazaar known as AlphaBay. And with the news that the site has been torn down by a law enforcement raid---and one of its leaders found dead in a Thai prison---the dark web drug trade has fallen into a temporary state of chaos. About a week ago Alpha...

Minnesota representative and Deputy Chair of the DNC Keith Ellison recently called on Twitter to ban Donald Trump once and for all, joining countless publications who have made the same demand. And currently, nearly 72,000 people have signed an online petition asking for the same. Unfortunately for all those dreaming of a Trump-free Twitter, it is almost certainly never going to happen. Learn more...

Remember when Myspace suffered one of the largest user data breaches ever? Around 360 million accounts were compromised in June 2013, but Myspace said in 2016 when it disclosed the incident that it was taking action to shore up its security. Which would be great, except that it turns out anyone could have taken over any Myspace account if they had the account owner’s listed name, username, and bir...

Despite what you may have heard, an Amazon Echo did not call the police earlier this week, when it heard a husband threatening his wife with a gun in New Mexico. On Monday, news reports took Bernalillo County authorities' version of those events credulously, heralding the home assistant as a hero. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Thursday, President Donald Trump stressed the importance of a particular feature of his proposed border wall: transparency. His reason? Without it, a 60-pound bag of heroin might fly over, and hit an unassuming passerby on the head, striking them dead. The vivid image invites flashbacks to Chuck Jones cartoons, and more than a few questions. But to take it on its merits: Yes, drugs do fly over...

On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a lengthy email chain from June, 2016. The tweet was an effort to get out ahead of a New York Times investigation into the meeting the emails discussed. They show Trump Jr. eagerly arranging to meet with a Russian lawyer, explicitly described as being government-affiliated, for the stated purpose of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump...

Rob Goldstone, a British-born former tabloid reporter and current publicist, has found himself in the middle of one of the biggest scandals of Trump's presidency thus far. When Donald Trump Jr. sat down with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with reported ties to the Kremlin (ties which Veselnitskaya denies), it was Goldstone who had brokered the encounter. After The New York Times first rep...

On the list of computer security advice standbys, "update your software" ranks just below with "don't use the password 'password.'" But as the cybersecurity research community gets to the bottom of the malware outbreak that exploded out of Ukraine to paralyze thousands of networks around the world last week—shutting down banks, companies, transportation and electric utilities—it's become clear tha...

After last month's Petya/NotPetya ransomware outbreak you may be feeling like the next global attack could come at any moment. It hasn't struck yet, but if the ransomware fear doesn't get you, the phishing paranoia might. And don't forget angst about power grid hacks. Reports this week revealed that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are scrambling to defend multiple US energy companies a...