With so much of our lives lived online, people have often assumed that the pictures, financial documents, and other sensitive information we store on our password-protected phones and computers are kept private. But every day, it seems there’s a new data breach, or another story about our information being passed around in ways we couldn’t imagine. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Molly Davis is a policy analyst at Libertas Institute, a policy think tank in Utah. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org...
Apr 02, 2019•6 min
Ransomware has long been the scourge of the cybersecurity industry. When that extortionate hacking goes beyond encrypting files to fully paralyze computers across a company, it represents not just a mere shakedown, but a crippling disruption. Now a nasty new breed of ransomware known as LockerGoga is inflicting that paralysis on industrial firms whose computers control actual physical equipment, and it's enough to deeply spook security researchers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/a...
Apr 01, 2019•10 min
Widespread adoption of the web encryption scheme HTTPS has added a lot of green padlocks—and corresponding data protection—to the web. Almost all of the popular sites you visit every day likely offer this defense, called Transport Layer Security (TLS), which encrypts data between your browser and the web servers it communicates with to protect your travel plans, passwords, and embarrassing Google searches from prying eyes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 29, 2019•7 min
Nothing much happened this week except, oh yeah, special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report on Friday night. Though attorney general William Barr now has the report in hand, the American people will still have to wait to see how much of it he decides to make public. In anticipation of the report, Mueller expert Garrett Graff laid out what information it could contain that would get Trump impeached. Beyond Mueller, it was actually already a news-packed week. Learn about your ad choices: dove...
Mar 29, 2019•6 min
Today's news that hackers put backdoors into thousands of Asus computers using the company's own software update platform is a reminder of why supply-chain compromises are one of the scariest digital attacks out there. Attackers compromised Asus’s Live Update tool to distribute malware to almost a million customers last year, according to initial findings researchers at the threat intelligence firm Kaspersky Lab disclosed Monday. The news was first reported by Motherboard. Learn about your ad ch...
Mar 28, 2019•7 min
At a typically glitzy launch event in Cupertino on Monday, Apple debuted the Apple Card, a new credit card offered in collaboration with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard. Apple claims it will resolve many consumer frustrations with current credit cards: the card will be simple to sign up for, there won't be any fees, and it will be easy to redeem rewards. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 28, 2019•5 min
In old spy novels, when two secret agents need to communicate with each other out in the field, one of them often leaves a document in an assigned place—tucked in the hollow of a tree trunk or between the pages of a certain library book. Once the first agent has safely vacated the scene, the second one moves in to fetch it. This maneuver—called a dead drop—may seem straightforward. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 27, 2019•7 min
Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Apple announced a whole lot of new things today Today's Apple Event had all kinds of updates: A new credit card, a new news subscription, and a new streaming subscription featuring celebrities from Oprah to Steven Spielberg and more. Let's break down exactly what's new: Apple News +, Apple's news subscription service: Roughly 300 magazines (including WIRED) within the Apple News App Designed for Apple devices $9. Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...
Mar 27, 2019•4 min
Continuing a now time-honored tradition of creating explosive news late on a Friday afternoon, special counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his final report to attorney general William Barr. The Mueller probe, which began not quite two years ago, has come to its conclusion. Time for the fallout—whatever form that takes. There are certain basic procedural facts that govern what happens next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 26, 2019•5 min
Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: The Mueller Report, Finally After nearly two years of work, special counsel Robert Mueller has turned in his final report to the nation's attorney general, William Barr. But what happens next is anyone's guess. For now the report will be for Barr's eyes only, who at some point will submit his own report to Congress with as much, or as little, information as he chooses to share. So for now, we wait. Again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.or...
Mar 26, 2019•3 min
The internet is full of lies. That maxim has become an operating assumption for any remotely skeptical person interacting anywhere online, from Facebook and Twitter to phishing-plagued inboxes to spammy comment sections to online dating and disinformation-plagued media. Now one group of researchers has suggested the first hint of a solution: an "online polygraph" that uses machine learning to detect deception from text alone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 25, 2019•9 min
Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Change your Facebook password Facebook acknowledged a bug that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords (dating back to 2012) for both Facebook and Instagram to be stored as readable text internally. This basically means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them. Facebook says they weren't accessible outside of the company, and that there's no evidence employees did in fact abuse or improperly access them. Lear...
Mar 25, 2019•3 min
At this point, it’s difficult to summarize all of Facebook’s privacy, misuse, and security missteps in one neat description. And it just got even harder. On Thursday, following a report by Krebs on Security, Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 22, 2019•7 min
When school began in Lockport, New York, this past fall, the halls were lined not just with posters and lockers, but cameras. Over the summer, a brand new $4 million facial recognition system installed by the school district in the town’s eight schools from elementary to high school. The system scans the faces of students as they roam the halls, looking for faces that have been uploaded and flagged as dangerous. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 22, 2019•8 min
With more than 2 billion users, Android has a staggering number of devices to protect. But a "high-severity" bug that went undetected for more than five years—that attackers could exploit to spy on a user and gain access to their accounts—serves as a reminder that Android's impressive open source reach also creates challenges for defending a decentralized ecosystem. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 21, 2019•4 min
Steve Hardigree hadn't even gotten to the office yet, and his day was already a waking nightmare. As Googled his company's name that morning last June, Hardigree found a growing list of headlines naming the 10-person marketing firm he'd founded three years earlier, Exactis, as the source of a leak of the personal records of nearly everyone in the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 20, 2019•13 min
As all of Washington—and the country—await the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe, which could come at any moment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put words last week to the as-yet-unspoken consensus on Capitol Hill: Impeaching the president will be a high bar. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 20, 2019•12 min
The world of antivirus is already fraught. You’re basically inviting all-seeing, all-knowing software onto your device, trusting that it’ll keep the bad guys out and not abuse its own access in the process. On Android, that problem is compounded by dozens of apps that aren’t just ineffective—they’re outright phony. That’s the finding of newly published research from AV-Comparatives, a European company that, as its name suggests, tests antivirus products. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...
Mar 19, 2019•5 min
This week ended with terror, as a shooting in New Zealand took the lives of at least 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A video of the attack, livestreamed by the shooter on Facebook, quickly spread across all major internet platforms, which demonstrated a general inability to stop it. Separately, we took a look at how ICE leans on cozy relationships with local law enforcement to access license plate location data it wouldn't otherwise be allowed to. Learn about your ad choic...
Mar 18, 2019•6 min
In January 2018 a group of hackers, now thought to be working for the North Korean state-sponsored group Lazarus, attempted to steal $110 million from the Mexican commercial bank Bancomext. That effort failed. But just a few months later, a smaller yet still elaborate series of attacks allowed hackers to siphon off 300 to 400 million pesos, or roughly $15 to $20 million from Mexican banks. Here's how they did it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 15, 2019•6 min
It happened again. Facebook went down in several pockets around the world for several hours Wednesday, as did Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp. The outage inspired the usual existential jokes—and rush to news sites, to fill the void—but also gave rise to conspiracy theories that hackers were the cause. As is almost always the case, those theories are wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 14, 2019•6 min
Over the last decade, license plate readers have become an increasingly popular tool for law enforcement around the United States. One federal agency that has aggressively pursued this data is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, through a $6.1 million contract with a private firm called Vigilant Solutions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 14, 2019•7 min
You’ve got no shortage of ways to send encrypted messages, and at least as many cloud services for sending large files. But the Venn diagram for the two remains surprisingly, inconveniently small. That’s the beauty of Mozilla’s Firefox Send, a free, intuitive, web-based service that lets you share large encrypted files, no strings attached. Send began in 2017 as an experiment, part of Firefox’s since-discontinued Test Pilot program. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 13, 2019•5 min
Venezuela's massive, nationwide power outages, which began on Thursday, have so far resulted in at least 20 deaths, looting, and loss of access to food, water, fuel, and cash for many of the country's of 31 million residents. Late Monday, the United States said its diplomats would leave the US embassy in Caracas, citing deteriorating conditions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 13, 2019•7 min
This week, RSA, one of the biggest cybersecurity conferences of the year took place in San Francisco. Researchers demonstrated lots of new reasons to freak out about your data security, but they also highlighted new techniques for staying safe. There’s the clever new tool that can protect Macs using Apple’s video game logic engine. And the NSA even made an appearance, revealing an open-source version of a powerful cybersecurity tool that agency had developed in house. Learn about your ad choices...
Mar 12, 2019•6 min
Aric Toler’s face is illuminated only by the glow of the video playing on his laptop. It’s dashcam footage, supposedly captured by a driver in the town of Makiivka in eastern Ukraine, showing a Russian military convoy on its way to shoot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 on July 17, 2014. At least, that’s the theory. Toler just has to prove it. To the untrained eye, the video is awfully dull. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 11, 2019•8 min
At the endless booths of this week's RSA security trade show in San Francisco, an overflowing industry of vendors will offer any visitor an ad nauseam array of "threat intelligence" and "vulnerability management" systems. But it turns out that there's already a decent, free feed of vulnerability information that can tell systems administrators what bugs they really need to patch, updated 24/7: Twitter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Mar 11, 2019•6 min
By this point, you've hopefully gotten the message that your personal data can end up exposed in all sorts of unexpected internet backwaters. But increased awareness hasn't slowed the problem. In fact, it's only grown bigger—and more confounding. Last week, security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected, publicly accessible MongoDB database containing 150 gigabytes-worth of detailed, plaintext marketing data—including 763 million unique email addresses. Learn about ...
Mar 08, 2019•10 min
Yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg presented an entirely new philosophy. For 15 years, the stated goal of Facebook has been to make the world more open and connected; the unstated goal was constructing a targeted advertising system built on nearly infinite data. Yesterday, though, Zuckerberg pronounced that the company was reversing course. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Mar 08, 2019•10 min
It's a familiar playbook for Google and Alphabet: Offer high-quality products like Gmail or Chrome, build a massive user base, and then capitalize on that reach to paternalistically promote safer practices across the tech industry. So far, this strategy has generally proved to be extremely effective. Now Chronicle, a company born last year out of X, Alphabet's "moonshot factory," is going to try it for defending corporate networks. On Monday, Chronicle announced its first product: Backstory. Lea...
Mar 07, 2019•5 min
