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Barack Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower ahead of the presidentialelection. The definitive word on this came today from two people who would know: Richard Burr and Mark Warner, who leadthe Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Of course,President Donald Trump refuses to believe this, even though it is the best news he could hope for. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Nothing much of interest happened in the world of cybersecurity this week. Kidding! But wouldn't that be nice? If we were living in a simpler time when innocent victims weren't hit by a new, weird hack every day, and international cyberespionage wasn't undermining everything from governments to businesses to Twitter accounts? You could just argue about who won The Bachelor and move on with your life. Unfortunately, this is 2017, so naturally this week's hacks were actually completely ridiculous....
You know not to click on links in sketchy emails. Everybody knows that. And yet, people fall for these phishing attacks all the time. Case in point: The FBI suspects a phishing email is how the Russian hackers who were indicted this week got into Yahoo. Ditto for the breach of the Democratic National Committee, and the Sony Pictures hack. In fact, there’s currently a Gmail phishing scam going around that even super savvy techies are falling for. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...
Last night, a swath of Twitter accounts with large followings—including Duke University, BBC North America, Forbes, and Amnesty International—tweeted out the same message, in Turkish, that included a swastika and hashtags that translate to “Nazi Germany, Nazi Holland.” The hacked accounts, which apparently stem from increasing vitriol between Turkey and Holland, appear to have all been restored. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
On February 26th, WIRED's security reporter Andy Greenberg received an email from Sophia Tupolev, the head of communications at the security firm Beame.io, saying she'd found a security issue on WIRED.com. Tupolev's company had discovered sensitive data in the source code on many pages on our site, including obfuscated, "hashed" passwords and email addresses for current and former WIRED writers. We corrected the problem right away. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Amid so many recent high-profile hacks and data breaches, security experts are fond of pointing out that there’s no such thing as perfect security. It’s true! But it also invites the question: Why doesn’t literally everything get hacked all the time? The answer has to do with the relative incentives and the costs of infiltrating a given network. And one of the concepts underlying that calculus is the idea of an “attack surface.” Here’s an example. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad...
If you’ve been feeling a little paranoid lately—like even your standing mixer may be spying on you—rest assured that Trump senior counselor Kellyanne Conway shares your struggle. On Sunday, apparently reacting to last week’s CIA WikiLeaks data dump, Conway told the Bergen Record that at this point, US citizens should consider all appliances compromised. Even their microwaves. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
This week's WikiLeaks revelations, which showed that the CIA can compromise a huge range of devices, shouldn't send you into paroxysms of fear over your smartphone. It should, though, be a solid reminder that one of the best ways to keep yourself safe from hackers is also one of the simplest: Update your gear. What allows hackers access to your devices, after all, are breakdowns and vulnerabilities in the firmware (read: operating system) that runs them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Of all the revelations to come out of the 9,000-page data dump of CIA hacking tools, one of the most explosive is the possibility that the spy agency can compromise Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted chat apps. If you use those apps, let's be perfectly clear: Nothing in the WikiLeaks docs says the CIA can do that. A close reading of the descriptions of mobile hacking outlined in the documents released by WikiLeaks shows that the CIA has not yet cracked those invaluable encryption tools. Learn...
US intelligence agencies face a difficult task. They are supposed to provide meaningful analysis that enables officials to manage serious national security problems such as terrorism, weapons proliferation, network attacks on government infrastructure, and counterintelligence efforts. Today these are diffuse and complex threats. There are newly powerful political actors on the international stage. Organizations that are not governments and have no physical territory can inflict great harm. Learn...
It started, like so many eruptions these days, with a tweet. Early Saturday morning, President Trump fired off a series of tweets accusing, without evidence, former PresidentBarack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower in the month before the election. Trump compared the alleged snooping to “Nixon/Watergate,” and intimated legal action. What makes the broader allegation so extraordinary isn’t that it is new. Quite the contrary. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
It was a week of could have beens and still coulds in security. We took a long look at a plan to stop rogue drones that might work great, if it’s ever legal. We looked at how Trump should spend that extra $54 billion on defense, if he insists. And we looked at Google’s end-to-end encryption hopes for Gmail, which appear to have faded over the last three years. Oh, also, some rogue stuffed bears made a great case against the Internet of Toys. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choic...
As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence conducted state business usinghis personal email account. An AOL account. Soof course someone hacked it. Witha phishing scam. This story offers no end of rolling punchlines, the kicker being thevitriol the vice president showed during the campaigntoward Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump said he’s preparing “a budget that rebuilds the military, eliminates the Defense sequester, and calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” The day before the speech, White House officials said the administration planned to propose a “historic” $54 billion increase in the defense budget. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Hacked medical devices have made scary headlines for years now. Dick Cheney ordered changes to his pacemaker to better protect it from hackers. Johnson & Johnson warned customers about a security bug in one of its insulin pumps last fall. And St. Jude has spent months dealing with the fallout of vulnerabilities in some of the company’s defibrillators, pacemakers, and other medical electronics. You’d think by now medical device companies would have learned something about security reform. Lea...
Right now, in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a hundred bucks to $925 million. Eight years ago the emerald was logged into evidence by detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gayman of the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Bureau. The two men are longtime veterans: 30 years for Miller, 28 for Gayman. Learn about ...
