Security, Spoken

A Russian sports official earlier this year estimated that as many as 2 million people would flock to the country during the World Cup, the month-long celebration of soccer—or football, fine—that kicks off today in Moscow. If you’re one of them, have fun! But also maybe leave your laptop at home. Yes, traveling to and between Russia’s 11 World Cup host cities should provide marvels aplenty. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Throughout the Trump administration, the State Department has repeatedly called for the "complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea. Heading into Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un's diplomatic negotiations in Singapore, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reaffirmed this ambition on Monday. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Your email spam filter works overtime to keep sketchy investing opportunities and cheap Viagra offers out of your inbox, but you've probably seen some scams sneak through. That's because email fraud operations are a multibillion-dollar business, often run by Nigerian-based syndicates that have members—not to mention targets—around the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The nuclear summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has concluded, with each securing something they value. The US will suspend the joint military exercises with South Korea that rattle the Hermit Kingdom. And North Korea has promised to denuclearize. At some point. Probably. But if the past is any sort of prologue, you shouldn't hold your breath. On the face of it, the agreement signed by Trump and Kim seems promising. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One of them jailbroke Nintendo handhelds in a former life. Another has more than one zero-day exploit to his name. A third signed on just prior to the devastating Shadow Brokers leak. These are a few of the members of the Windows red team, a group of hackers inside Microsoft who spend their days finding holes in the world’s most popular operating system. Without them, you’d be toast. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

"Oops, your files have been encrypted!" This was the chilling message that greeted hundreds of thousands of computer users last summer. The WannaCry ransomware attack brought production to a standstill at Renault factories across France, put lives at risk by attacking hospitals in the UK, and cost companies around the world billions of dollars in lost revenue. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg) is NATO secretary general and the former prime minister of Norway. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As hard as it is to believe at this point, the week really did start with Apple's WWDC keynote. It feels like a lifetime ago! You can get a full recap here, but the two main security takeaways are that Safari is the best mainstream privacy browser now, and that it looks like Apple's going to slow down, take a breath, and try to release some major updates without quite so many bugs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

British security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who was indicted and arrested last summer for allegedly creating and conspiring to sell the Kronos banking trojan, now faces four additional charges. Hutchins, also called MalwareTech and MalwareTechBlog, is well-known in the security community for slowing the spread of WannaCry ransomware as it tore through the world's PCs in May 2017. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook has found itself the subject of another privacy scandal, this time involving privacy settings. A glitch caused up to 14 million Facebook users to have their new posts inadvertently set to public, the company revealed Thursday. The bug, which reportedly occurred while Facebook was testing a new feature, went live on May 18. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In January 2014, Google made a fundamental change to its search product: It started showing answers to user queries directly in so-called snippets, no further clicks required. But what started out as a time-saver has morphed into a repeated source of misleading and outright false information, thanks to Google's frequent reliance on untrusted sources. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

During a nearly four-hour grilling before Parliament Wednesday, Alexander Nix, former CEO of the now defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica, faced the ghosts of his past. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the end of June, digital credit card transactions are getting a mandatory encryption upgrade. It's good news—but not if you have an old device, or depend on a retailer that hasn't completed the transition. When data moves from one device to another, it needs to protection so it isn't intercepted and manipulated along the way. This defense is especially crucial, as you might imagine, for sensitive communications like financial transactions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a weekend of rumors, Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code. It's in many ways a natural fit Microsoft, which has in recent years warmed up to open source. But the beloved developer platform may also introduce moderation headaches. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Apple announced a slew of new software features at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, including an augmented reality upgrade and animojis that can stick out their tongues when you do. But the company's latest desktop and mobile operating systems contain a more subtle, yet more radical, innovation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When criminals are plotting, so are vigilant police departments. Officers are increasingly turning to software and ­predictive analytics to anticipate when and where misdeeds are likely to occur. But big data is just one component in a growing arsenal of high-tech policing tools. As agencies around the country push for faster, savvier law enforcement, they’re looking more and more like the precrime unit in Minority Report. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week we looked inward for change; if you ever wondered what it’s like to be a national technology and culture magazine that loses $100,000 in Bitcoin, have we got a story for you. If you'd rather an even wilder tale from around the globe, please read about how Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko faked his own death, and why some of his colleagues have cried foul. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

James Clapper was eating lunch in Muscat, Oman, on November 9, 2016, when at 2:31 am EST Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election. Clapper was on one of his final trips abroad at the end of a 54-year-long career in the military and intelligence, working with allies to shore up US interests overseas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Marcellino Ornelas had been in and out of juvenile hall seven times by the time he finally went to prison at the age of 19 for assault with a firearm. He'd already been kicked out of high school and was working, he says, as the "local drug dealer," with a side gig at a Ross department store. In the past, every time he got out, he'd start dealing soon after. "It was like, this is how I make money. This is who my friends are," Ornelas says. "That always brought me back to the same situation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's a truism by now that the federal government struggles with cybersecurity, but a report recent report by the White House's Office of Management and Budget reinforces the dire need for change across dozens of agencies. Of the 96 federal agencies it assessed, it deemed 74 percent either "At Risk" or "High Risk," meaning that they need crucial and immediate improvements. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Papua New Guinea, a small, island nation that shares a border with Indonesia, may soon turn off Facebook. The nation's communication minister suggested Tuesday that the government restrict access to the site for one month while it conducts research into issues like fake profiles, misinformation, and pornography. PNG will also reportedly explore creating its own, government-run alternative to Facebook. When the news reached Western outlets Tuesday, some people applauded. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

At the beginning of the year, revelations about a new type of processor vulnerability had far-reaching implications for devices all over the world, and this week researchers disclosed yet another of these so-called "speculative execution" flaws in Intel, AMD, and ARM chips. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Michael Caputo’s favorite novel is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the story of the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s and all the oddball characters who surround him. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you've been in a large crowded place with a fair amount of security, you've probably seen bomb-sniffing dogs at work. (You may have even petted the puppers.) Dogs have long been used for detecting contraband and explosives, but attackers have made advances in body-worn explosive technology, forcing law enforcement to evolve too. This means enlisting a new type of canine defense: Vapor Wake dogs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in 2013, when you could still mine bitcoins at home, WIRED was sent a small, sleek mining device manufactured by the now-defunct Butterfly Labs. We turned on the Roku-looking machine in our San Francisco offices and allowed it to do its job. A small fortune was soon amassed, now worth around $100,000. Then, we lost the money. Forever. Here's what happened to WIRED's 13 Bitcoins—and to the millions of others that have faced the same fate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, Seattle news station KIRO 7 published a disconcerting story. A Portland family discovered that a snippet of private conversation had been recorded by an Amazon Echo and sent to a random person in their contact list. The report instantly sparked concern and outrage that Amazon's Echo smart speaker is listening to and recording much more than the company claims. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Home routers have become the rats to hackers' bubonic plague: An easily infected, untreated and ubiquitous population in which dangerous digital attacks can spread. Now security researchers are warning that one group of sophisticated hackers has amassed a collection of malware-infected routers that could be used as a powerful tool to spread havoc across the internet, or simply triggered to implode networks across the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Law enforcement agencies including the FBI have long criticized data encryption as a threat to their ability to fight crime. They argue that encryption allows bad actors to "go dark," impeding agents’ ability to access the data of suspects, even with court orders or warrants. After years of raising the alarm about the going dark problem, though, officials have yet to convince privacy advocates that undermining encryption protections would do more good than harm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Good news for those looking to secure their Facebook accounts: The social network says users can now sign up for two-factor authentication using apps like Duo and Google Authenticator, which will strengthen people's security on the site. Previously, you could only sign up for the feature with a phone number, though you could also enable tools like physical security keys and Facebook's own code generator that lives within the app itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As is often the case, it was a week of mixed messages in security, with the White House eliminating its top cybersecurity policy roles at a crucial moment in geopolitics and the evolution of cyberwar. WIRED took a deep look at Robert Mueller's military service in Vietnam and his first year as special counsel, examining the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are plenty of guides available on how to protect your data, how to secure yourself online, and how to stop digital snoops from tracking you across the web and then profiting from that intrusion. (Sorry, “monetization”.) You should do these things. But if a cascading series of revelations this past week has taught us anything, it's that all of those steps amount to triage. The things you can control add up to very little next to the things you can’t. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s contact and relationships with Russia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a highly anticipated hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, lawmakers questioned Christopher Wylie, a former research director for the shadowy political data firm Cambridge Analytica, about the company's history of privacy violations, its contacts with Russia, and its work with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook announced this week that algorithms catch 99.5 percent of the terrorism-related content it deletes before a single user reports it. Thanks to steadily advancing AI tools, that's an improvement from last year, when that figure hovered around 97 percent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most antivirus scanners play a classic cat and mouse game: They work by checking software against a frequently updated list of potential threats. In response, a whole industry has built up to help occlude and conceal hacking tools. That includes services that automate the process of checking all sorts of tools, from malware to malicious URLs, against dozens of defense scanners to see if they would get blocked. The feedback helps bad actors know what to tweak further, and whats ready to use. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With midterm elections looming and primaries already underway in many states, anxiety has been building over the possibility of cyberattacks that could impact voting. Though officials and election security researchers alike are adamant that voters can trust the United States election system, they also acknowledge shortcomings of the current security setup. Little time remains to meaningfully improve election security before the midterms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A little over a month ago, the White House forced out Tom Bossert, its cybersecurity czar. A week later, cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce said he would depart as well. And now, rather than replace either, the Trump administration will do without anyone at the helm of its cybersecurity policy. It couldn’t have picked a worse time. The news that the newly appointed national security adviser John Bolton has decided to phase out the cybersecurity coordinator role was first reported by Politico. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The ubiquitous email encryption schemes PGP and S/MIME are vulnerable to attack, according to a group of German and Belgian researchers who posted their findings on Monday. The weakness could allow a hacker to expose plaintext versions of encrypted messages—a nightmare scenario for users who rely on encrypted email to protect their privacy, security, and safety. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this week, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released roughly 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm. Among them: Ads purchased in May of 2016 that promoted a suspicious Chrome extension that gained wide access to the Facebook accounts and web browsing behavior of those who installed it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, the United States officially backed out of the Iran nuclear deal. The geopolitical reverberations should continue to play out in a variety of fields, but make sure you count cybersecurity among them. Iran targeted the US frequently—particularly financial institutions before the deal went into place. Security experts warn that with the agreement no longer in place, the barrage could begin again. So, look out for that! We also took a look at facial recognition technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating more than 170 million cameras so far. In a December test of the dragnet in Guiyang, a city of 4.3 million people in southwest China, a BBC reporter was flagged for arrest within seven minutes of police adding his headshot to a facial recognition database. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the US last tightened its sanctions against Iran in 2012, then-president Barack Obama boasted that they were "virtually grinding the Iranian economy to a halt." Iran fired back with one of the broadest series of cyberattacks ever to target the US, bombarding practically every major American bank with months intermittent distributed denial of service attacks that pummeled their websites with junk traffic, knocking them offline. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The week started with a figurative bang, as a list of questions Robert Mueller's team have for Trump leaked to The New York Times. They all point to one inevitable conclusion: That Mueller almost certainly already knows how all of this ends. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's important to proactively secure your social media accounts, especially since you never know when an innocuous mistake could put you at risk. But it isn't just a theoretical threat. Pranksters, vandals, and malicious attackers all look for ways to get into any legitimate account they can. So while you don't need to hide in a hole, there are some worthwhile (and easy!) steps you can take to keep your accounts from being hijacked. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, Twitter chief technology officer Parag Agrawal disclosed in a blog post that the company had inadvertently recorded user passwords, in plaintext, in an internal system. This is not how things are supposed to go! And while Twitter has fixed the bug, and doesn't think any of the exposed passwords were accessed in any way, you should still change your Twitter password right now to make sure your account is secure. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly four years have passed since researchers began to experiment with a hacking technique known as "Rowhammer," which breaks practically every security model of a computer by manipulating the physical electric charge in memory chips to corrupt data in unexpected ways. Since that attack exploits the most fundamental properties of computer hardware, no software patch can fully fix it. And now, for the first time, hackers have found a way to use Rowhammer against Android phones over the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You would think that after decades of analyzing and fighting email spam, there'd be a fix by now for the internet's oldest hustle—the Nigerian Prince scam. There's generally more awareness that a West African noble demanding $1,000 in order to send you millions is a scam, but the underlying logic of these “pay a little, get a lot” schemes, also known as 419 fraud, still ensnares a ton of people. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cambridge Analytica, the embattled data firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, has told employees it is shutting down, along with its UK counterpart SCL Elections. The move, which impacts all offices of both companies worldwide, comes amid recent revelations that the company harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent, according to multiple sources close to the company. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The beginning of May marks the longest period of public silence from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team since his first charges last October—more than two months without any new plea deals, fresh indictments, or publicly “flipped” witnesses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Republican majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released an over 250-page report Friday outlining its months-long investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The full report, the key findings of which were published in March, finds that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices