Security, Spoken

Android's recently released Oreo update packs in plenty of features, including a battery life boost and a notifications rethink. But Oreo's most important improvements will happen behind the scenes, with a host of security updates designed to evolve with ever-expanding digital threats. From halting ransomware to blocking malicious apps and easing Android's longstanding fragmentation woes, Oreo tac...

In November of 2015, Will Caput worked for a security firm assigned to a penetration test of a major Mexican restaurant chain, scouring its websites for hackable vulnerabilities. So when 40-year-old Caput took a lunch break, he had beans and guacamole on his mind. He decided to drive to the local branch of the restaurant in Chico, California. While there, still in the mindset of testing the restau...

In the ongoing drama that is the Trump presidency, secondary characters constantly float in and out as new storylines and Special Counsel inquiries come to light. It’s easy to lose track. So to help, let’s get to know some of Trump’s satellites, both new and old, a little better. Let’s take a look at their Amazon.com Wish Lists. In case you're unfamiliar with the feature, when you shop for an item...

Early in August, NYU professor Siddharth Garg checked for traffic, and put a yellow Post-it onto a stop sign outside the Brooklyn building in which he works. When he and two colleagues showed a photo of the scene to their road-sign detector software, it was 95 percent sure the stop sign in fact displayed a speed limit. The stunt demonstrated a potential security headache for engineers working with...

Almost exactly five years after seeing the first demonstration of Cody Brocious’ Onity hacking tool, I meet Aaron Cashatt face to face in the fluorescent-lit, cafeteria-style visiting room of the Cibola Unit of the Yuma State Prison Complex. Under his orange jumpsuit he’s bulked up from prison-yard weightlifting and seems clear-eyed and sharp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...

In a refreshing change of pace, this week’s security news included little to no escalation of nuclear rhetoric. Let’s count that as a win! Among quite a few losses. Digital financial services provider Enigma, for instance, lost its supporters almost $500,000 in cryptocurrency thanks to bad password habits. Domestic helper robots lost security cred by being hacked into tiny robotic Chucky dolls. Le...

The Trickbot malware that targets bank customers. Password harvesters like Mimikatz. "Fileless malware" attacks. All three are popular hacking tools and techniques, but they're unconnected except for one trait: They all rely in part on manipulating a Windows management tool known as PowerShell to carry out their attacks. Long a point of interest for security researchers, PowerShell techniques incr...

Data breaches and hacks of US government networks, once novel and shocking, have become a problematic fact of life over the last few years. So it makes sense that a cybersecurity analysis released today placed the government at 16 out of 18 in a ranking of industries, ahead of only telecommunications and educations. Healthcare, transportation, financial services, retail, and pretty much everything...

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The digital financial services developer Enigma prides itself on ultra-secure products. The company's Catalyst platform protects financial info with a cutting-edge combination of blockchain-inspired privacy technology and cryptography. So it comes as no small surprise that on Monday, scammers took over the company's website, mailing lists, and Slack accounts by exploiting some extremely basic secu...

They say April is the cruelest month, but HBO may beg to differ. The company kicked off August with an apparently massive breach of its servers, in which hackers pilfered everything from full episodes of unreleased shows to sensitive internal documents. Not long after, in separate and distinct incidents, two episodes of Game of Thrones leaked out early. And Thursday, hacker group OurMine hijacked...

Say you're a white supremacist who happens to hate Jewish people—or black people, Muslim people, Latino people, take your pick. Today, you can communicate those views online any number of ways without setting off many tech companies' anti–hate speech alarm bells. And that's a problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The white supremacist site The Daily Stormer has taken a nomadic journey around the web this week, searching for a permanent home after being booted by the hosting and domain registry company GoDaddy. Throughout its bizarre odyssey, though, the infrastructure and web services company Cloudflare has defended the site against cyber attacks, particularly DDoS attacks. Wednesday, Cloudflare finally pu...

The schedule for Donald Trump's his first full day back in New York since the start of his presidency entailed walking into the Trump Tower lobby, talking about infrastructure for a few minutes, and immediately re-boarding his golden elevator without taking any questions. Much to Chief of Staff John Kelly's apparent chagrin, that did not happened. Instead, Trump opted to take a few questions after...

North Korea's nuclear and ballistic ambitions have existed for decades; the country conducted its first significant missile test launches in the 1980s, and conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Now, thanks to a recent surge of development, the intertwined endeavors have both advanced to the point that experts have warned about for years. The worst-case North Korea hypotheticals, in other words...

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