Security, Spoken

The threat of a nuclear missile strike on United States soil has felt more tangible over the past few years, thanks to North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile testing and oscillating relationships between the two countries. Against that backdrop, President Donald Trump announced plans on Thursday for the next generation of missile defense on land, sea—and in space. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The current federal government shutdown, the longest in United States history, is in its fourth week, with no clear path to resolution. With 800,000 federal employees on full or partial leave as a result, cybersecurity experts raised an early alarm about how the shutdown would impact US cybersecurity. Those early concerns have since compounded, and evolved into a mounting crisis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Stochastic Terrorism n. Acts of violence by random extremists, triggered by political demagoguery. When President Trump tweeted a video of himself body-slamming the CNN logo in 2017, most ­people took it as a stupid joke. For Cesar Sayoc, it may have been a call to arms: Last October the avowed Trump fan allegedly mailed a pipe bomb to CNN headquarters. No one told Sayoc to do it, but the fact that it happened was really no surprise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Late Thursday night, Buzzfeed published a report that President Donald Trump instructed his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. If true, it means impeachment can’t be far off. In fact, Trump’s behavior has been so broadly suspect, Garrett Graff argues, that he’s either a Russian agent or the biggest “useful idiot” in history. Or both. In other government news, we took a look at the major toll the government shutdown has taken on US cybersecurity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With Netflix's recent price hike announcement, you may be taking stock of all the streaming accounts you pay for every month. It's no secret that the easiest way to cut down without sacrificing Blue Planet is to share logins with friends, family, or your neighbor's cousin's coworker. The Greatest Generation had party lines, and millennials have communal cord-cutting. No judgment here if you're voluntarily sharing your Hulu or Netflix or Spotify account. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the government shutdown neared the one-month mark, the political landscape shifted under Washington’s feet Thursday night, dramatically and perhaps permanently altering the path of our nation’s politics. BuzzFeed’s duo of Russia probe reporters posted a blockbuster report that President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow Project. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The secure messaging app Telegram is significant for two very different reasons. One is that the app is a go-to encrypted communication tool for hundreds of millions of users around the world, particularly those looking to duck government surveillance and censorship in countries like Russia and Iran. The other is that many cryptography experts have cast doubt on the integrity of Telegram's encryption scheme. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

They kept the kids in cages. And Excel spreadsheets. And more than 60 other government files and databases that made it nearly impossible to track the thousands of children who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration while trying to enter the United States. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are breaches, and there are megabreaches, and there’s Equifax. But a newly revealed trove of leaked data tops them all for sheer volume: 772,904,991 million unique email addresses, over 21 million unique passwords, all recently posted to a hacking forum. The data set was first reported by security researcher Troy Hunt, who maintains Have I Been Pwned, a way to search whether your own email or password has been compromised by a breach at any point. (Trick question: It has. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fortnite topped 200 million registered players at the end of 2018, continuing its run of massive growth and dominance in online gaming. But huge platforms also inevitably have huge targets on their backs. Fortnite has already dealt with its share of digital security issues, particularly scams like imposter Android apps. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you use social media, you've probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Kate O'Neill is the founder of KO Insights and the author of Tech Humanist and Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces. Instead of joining in, I posted the following semi-sarcastic tweet: https://twitter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the US government shut down on December 21stthere was an overlooked victim: the Violence Against Women Act, which expired the same day. That lapse means that new funds for Department of Justice’s VAWA programs, such as hotlines, shelters, crisis centers, and legal assistance, will not be funded until the law is reauthorized. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Gianmarco Raddi is an MD/PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, UCLA, and the National Institutes of Health. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Another week, another crypto heist. This time, Ethereum Classic was the target, when hackers stole around $1.1 million worth of coins by taking over 51-percent of the currency’s network. Another familiar blunder came this week when it was revealed that technologically challenged convicted criminal Paul Manafort had yet another problem using basic tech. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Iranian hackers have been busy lately, ramping up an array of targeted attacks across the Middle East and abroad. And a report this week from the threat intelligence firm FireEye details a massive global data-snatching campaign, carried out over the last two years, that the firm has preliminarily linked to Iran. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Heads up, tech companies: If your product appeals to the masses, it likely also holds allure for terrorist groups like ISIS. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Rita Katzis the Executive Director and founder of theSITE Intelligence Group, the world’s leading non-governmental counterterrorism organization specializing in tracking and analyzing the online activity of the global extremist community. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

An international group of researchers has developed an algorithmic tool that uses Twitter to automatically predict exactly where you live in a matter of minutes, with more than 90 percent accuracy. It can also predict where you work, where you pray, and other information you might rather keep private, like, say, whether you’ve frequented a certain strip club or gone to rehab. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Location data is some of the most sensitive, and sought after, information that smartphones generate. And wireless providers are in a unique position to access it all the time. But a Tuesday report from Motherboard shows that carriers don't protect this deeply private information as carefully as consumers might think—especially considering that Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T all pledged to stop selling it months ago. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Paul Manafort has a horrible track record when it comes to digital security. The latest reminder came this week, when his defense lawyers failed to sufficiently redact portions of a court filing submitted on Tuesday, responding to Robert Mueller’s claims that Manafort violated his plea agreement with the special counsel by lying to prosecutors. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the last several years, Yubico has become close to ubiquitous in the field of hardware authentication. Its YubiKey token can act as a second layer of security for your online accounts, and even let you skip out on using passwords altogether. The only problem? It’s been largely unusable on the iPhone. That’s going to change soon. The upshot: Yubico has received MFi certification, meaning Apple will officially support it as a hardware partner. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last Friday, just like Punxsutawney Phil, DC District Court judge Beryl Howell emerged from her chambers, saw her shadow, and announced six more months of Bob Mueller. Judge Howell’s extension of Mueller’s grand jury, which was set to expire over the weekend, was widely expected—the special counsel’s office has made clear in recent weeks that it has plenty of unfinished business—but the extension underscores just how much work is still left in Mueller’s probe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You know what they say, the first hacks of January set the tone for the rest of year. (Wait, no one has ever said that.) But with that in mind, we tried to bring you mostly good news this week. First up, we explained why Tor, that wondrous anonymizer, is now easier to use than ever. As the world descends further into digital authoritarianism, anonymity networks like Tor become even more important. And thanks to a slew of improvements last year, Tor has become accessible for just about everyone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In an extensive series of tweets throughout December, hackers leaked sensitive data from hundreds of German politicians, including members of the European parliament, German parliament, and regional state parliaments. The move reflects an insidious strategy criminals and hacktivists sometimes use to expose and endanger targets by leaking deeply person details about them and their families. The leaks also impacted Chancellor Angela Merkel to a degree, as well as some journalists and performers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A year ago today, Intel coordinated with a web of academic and independent researchers to disclose a pair of security vulnerabilities with unprecedented impact. Since then, a core Intel hacking team has worked to help clean up the mess—by creating attacks of their own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You probably know about the digital anonymity service Tor, but for whatever reason you may not actually use it. Maybe between the nodes, traffic rerouting, and special onion URLs it seems too confusing to be worth the effort. In truth, Tor has been relatively accessible for years now, largely because of the Tor Browser, which works almost exactly like a regular browser and does all the complicated stuff for you in the background. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After years of targeted hacks, epic heists, and run of the mill data breaches you might think that institutions would be getting wise to the importance of strong cybersecurity. It seems 2018 was not the year. Here’s WIRED’s look back at the biggest breaches, data exposures, ransomware attacks, state-sponsored campaigns, and general hacks of the year. Stay safe in 2019. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This year thankfully avoided any world-breaking ransomware attacks like NotPetya. It even had some small victories, like GitHub beating back the biggest DDoS attack in history. Still, online threats are manifold, lurking and evolving, making the internet a more hostile place than ever. The biggest threats online continued to mirror the biggest threats in the real world, with nation states fighting proxy battles and civilians bearing the brunt of the assault. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The global conversation around data privacy changed dramatically in March of 2018. That’s when Cambridge Analytica made international headlines. It was the story of a shadowy political firm misappropriating the data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. But really, the story was how Facebook, keeper of 2 billion users' private messages, photos, and social connections, let it happen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As democracies around the world struggle to hold back the rising tide of authoritarianism, a similar crisis is unfolding online. Three factors converged this year to make 2018 the eighth straight year that global internet freedom declined, according to an annual report from the nonprofit Freedom House: increasing censorship in response to disinformation, the widespread collection of personal data, and a growing group of countries emulating China’s model of digital authoritarianism. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cybersecurity can feel like a chaotic free-for-all sometimes, but it's not every day that a whole new conceptual type of attack crops up. Over the last 15 months, though, cryptojacking has been exactly that. It's officially everywhere, and it's not going away. The concept of cryptojacking is pretty simple: An attacker finds a way to harness the processing power of computers she doesn't own—or pay the electric bills on—to mine cryptocurrency for herself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The week started with bombshell Senate reports on the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. We dived deep to explain how Russians used meme warfare to divide America, why Instagram was the Internet Research Agency’s go-to social media platform for spreading misinformation, and how Russians specifically targeted black Americans in an effort to exploit racial wounds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The American military is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence, which top officials are convinced will deliver victory in future warfare. But internal Pentagon documents and interviews with senior officials make clear that the Defense Department is reeling from being spurned by a tech giant and struggling to develop a plan that might work in a new sort of battle—for hearts and minds in Silicon Valley. The battle began with an unexpected loss. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Imagine you’re a burglar. You’ve decided to tackle a high-end luxury apartment, the kind of building with multiple Picassos in the penthouse. You could spend weeks casing the place, studying every resident’s schedule, analyzing the lock on every door. You could dig through trash for hints about which units have alarms, run through every permutation of what the codes might be. That’s one way to do it. You could also just steal the super’s keys. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday, the security and anti-phishing firm Area 1 published details of a breach that compromised one of the European Union's diplomatic communication channels for three years. The perpetrators also compromised systems related to the United Nations, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and a number of international foreign affairs ministries. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Phishing scams often come in waves. Last year it was a phony Google Docs link and a convincing Netflix impersonator, both of which had plagued the internet sporadically for months, at least, before seeing big surges. This month, it's a bogus Apple App Store email that convinces its victims to cough up all kinds of personal information. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The contrast could hardly be more striking. In October, Vice President Mike Pence delivered ablistering speechaccusing China of stealing prized US technology and military hardware. Barely two weeks later, one of Beijing’s most powerful bureaucrats touched down in Israel for a visit focused onbuilding tieswith its tech and innovation sectors. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Scott Moore is Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For many women, especially journalists, politicians, and other public figures, Twitter is something to endure. Many have accounts out of professional necessity, but the cost of their participation in Twitter discourse is often abuse, threats, and harassment. Women learn to block, mute, report, and ignore their mentions. Some tweet directly at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, frustrated that he seems never to take the problem of abuse against women on the site seriously. He rarely answers them directly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In May, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement, negotiated by the Obama Administration, designed to keep Iran from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons. As part of that reversal, the Trump administration reimposed economic sanctions on Iran. From the start, the US actions stoked tensions and fear of Iranian retaliation in cyberspace. Now, some see signs that the pushback has arrived. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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If you thought you were going to make it out of 2018 without a couple more data slip-ups, think again! Two incidents bookended the week. Monday, Google revealed that a bug in its somehow still alive Google+ social network exposed the data of 52.5 million users. That's orders of magnitude bigger than the 500,000 users that were impacted by a previous Google+ exposure. And on Friday, Facebook announced that it had exposed photos of up to 6.8 million users for nearly two weeks in September. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you haven’t heard, 2018 was extremely bad for Facebook. The company was rocked by so many scandals that it’s become hard to list them all in one place. I won’t try here, but I will say it’s equally difficult to determine how much those missteps really matter to Facebook’s billions of users. During a one-day event in New York City on Thursday, the social network got a chance to find out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In offices and universities all across the country Thursday, the same threat appeared in email inboxes: Pay $20,000 worth of bitcoin, or a bomb will detonate in your building. Police departments sent out alerts. Workers from Los Angeles to Raleigh, North Carolina, evacuated their cubicles in the middle of the day. All over Twitter, people posted screenshots of the emails, many different versions of which appear to have been blasted out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This has not been Facebook's proudest year for privacy and security. The company faced the massive Cambridge Analytica data misuse and abuse scandal in April and beyond. It also disclosed its first data breach in October, which compromised information from 30 million accounts. But Facebook has at least one security-focused bright spot it can point to in 2018: its bug bounty. Bug bounties are programs that let security researchers submit potential flaws and vulnerabilities in a company's software. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The massive data breach that affected 500 million Marriott customers feels like a recent event, given that the company just discovered and disclosed it over the last four months. But it's important to remember that the attack began much earlier, especially as Reuters and others have reported that state-sponsored Chinese hackers were behind it. If that attribution holds up, China's broader hacking campaign against the US in 2014 will go down as a historic assault. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We are deep into the worst case scenarios. But as new sentencing memos for Trump associates Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen make all too clear, the only remaining question is how bad does the actual worst case scenario get? The potential innocent explanations for Donald Trump’s behavior over the last two years have been steadily stripped away, piece by piece. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In October, Google dramatically announced that it would shut down Google+ in August 2019, because the company had discovered through an internal audit (and a simultaneous Wall Street Journal exposé) that a bug in Google+ had exposed 500,000 users' data for about three years. Maybe it should have pulled the plug sooner. On Monday, Google announced that an additional bug in a Google+ API, part of a November 7 software update, exposed user data from 52.5 million accounts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly after a month after the midterm elections, details on a hack of the Republican National Congressional Committee reveals that meddling in the midterms was much worse than it seemed on election day. The hack probably should have been the biggest news of the week, but for a little distracting—and important!—thing called the Mueller probe. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Australia's parliament passed controversial legislation on Thursday that will allow the country's intelligence and law enforcement agencies to demand access to end-to-end encrypted digital communications. This means that Australian authorities will be able to compel tech companies like Facebook and Apple to make backdoors in their secure messaging platforms, including WhatsApp and iMessage. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

I first came across the imposter Facebook page by accident. The page was made to look like that of my employer, Vietnam Veterans of America, complete with our organization's registered trademark and name. As an Iraq veteran and the office’s designated millennial policy guy, I was helping run VVA's social media accounts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the founder and director of a nonprofit animal shelter on the East Coast, Alana has spent most of the past decade caring for pets that might otherwise be euthanized. Her work also resonates with people online—the Facebook page for the shelter has more than 1.3 million followers. But in August, she noticed something strange: A series of unfamiliar posts began appearing on the page, and no one at the shelter could say where they were coming from. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Though sporadic hacker intrusions and phishing campaigns targeted political entities in the lead-up to November's midterm elections, things seemed pretty quiet overall on the election-meddling front in the US. Certainly no leaks or theatrics rose to the level of Russia's actions during the 2016 presidential election. But a belatedly revealed breach of the National Republican Congressional Committee shows just how bad the attack on the 2018 election really was. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices