Pig butchering scams have already stolen hundreds of millions of dollars. And while attackers, mainly crime syndicates in China, have developed scripts and playbooks for carrying out the attacks, new findings from researchers at the security firm Sophos show how pig butchers are tweaking and refining their strategies to try to ensnare more unsuspecting victims.Researchers found that to stay … [Read more...]
How to Make Sure You’re Not Accidentally Sharing Your Location
Your devices and apps really, really want to know where you are—whether it's to tell you the weather, recommend some restaurants you might like, or better target advertising at you. Managing what you're sharing and what you're not sharing, and when, can quickly get confusing.It's also possible that you have inconsistencies in the various location histories logged by your devices: Times when you … [Read more...]
North Korean Hackers Are Attacking US Hospitals
With a major United States intelligence authority set to expire at the end of the year, and a congressional showdown brewing over whether or not to renew it, new details of an internal audit show that US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) personnel have repeatedly conducted unlawful searches of data collected under the imperiled surveillance authority. Agents requested information on … [Read more...]
The FBI’s Most Controversial Surveillance Tool Is Under Threat
An existential fight over the US government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which … [Read more...]
Meet the Creator of North Korea’s Favorite Crypto Privacy Service
In the cryptocurrency economy, there's often a fine line between financial privacy and money laundering. Now one Bitcoin "mixer" service called Sinbad.io is walking that tightrope in full public view: Just a few months after launching on the open web, it appears to have already become the preferred money-laundering outlet for the world's most prolific state-sponsored crypto thieves.In a portion of … [Read more...]
Russia’s Ransomware Gangs Are Being Named and Shamed
For years, Russia-based ransomware gangs have launched crippling attacks against businesses, hospitals, and public sector bodies, extorting hundreds of millions of dollars from victims and causing untold disruption. And they’ve done so with impunity—but no more. Today, as part of a push to shut down ransomware gangs, the UK and US governments have unmasked some of the criminals behind the … [Read more...]
Want to Delete Your Twitter DMs? Good Luck With That
Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key … [Read more...]
The Political Theater Behind the State of the Union Data Privacy Push
If you talk to House Republicans, President Joe Biden delivered an offensive, hyper-partisan diatribe last evening. Hell, if you just listened to the State of the Union address, you’d have heard the commander-in-chief heckled as a “liar,” blamed for the opioid epidemic—"It’s your fault!”—or heard him met with a thunderous and sustained Republican “BOOOOOOOOOOO!”Most all of those raucous … [Read more...]
How the US Can Stop Data Brokers' Worst Practices—Right Now
The same advancements that pulled swaths of humanity out of factories and fields and plopped them behind desks have left consumers outgunned and ill-prepared for life under constant surveillance. Shadowy data brokers constrained by few laws today gather and supply mountains of information to companies and government agencies with enormous sway over everyday facets of life—from the ability to get a … [Read more...]
Biden's SOTU: Data Privacy Is Now a Must-Hit US State of the Union Topic
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, enacted in 2018, provides far from perfect data privacy protection, but it stands in stark contrast to the legislative dearth in the United States where there is currently no comprehensive federal data privacy law on the books. In his second State of the Union address this evening, though, US President Joe Biden devoted more attention than … [Read more...]
Inside Safe City, Moscow’s AI Surveillance Dystopia
Sergey Vyborov was on his way to the Moscow Metro’s Aeroport station last September when police officers stopped him. The 49-year-old knew that taking the metro could spell trouble. During a protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, police had fingerprinted and photographed him. He’d already been detained four times in 2022. But he was rushing to his daughter’s birthday, so he took a … [Read more...]
Googling for Software Downloads Is Extra Risky Right Now
If you heard rumblings this week that Netflix is finally cracking down on password sharing in the United States and other markets, you heard wrong—but only for now. The company told WIRED that while it plans to make an announcement in the next few weeks about limiting account sharing, nothing has happened yet. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Congress are eager to overhaul systems for dealing with secret … [Read more...]
The Chinese Spy Balloon Shows the Downsides of Spy Balloons
On Friday, United States secretary of state Antony Blinken said he was canceling a high-profile diplomatic visit to Beijing following the discovery of a large, high-altitude Chinese balloon that has been drifting over the US this week. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Friday that the airship is an off-course weather balloon and has denied that it is an espionage tool. … [Read more...]
Congress Has a Lo-Fi Plan to Fix the Classified Documents Mess
Congress is coming for the nation’s intelligence community. Bipartisan anger at mounting scandals over the mishandling of classified material by two presidents and a vice president is now palpable. The catch is, lawmakers don’t entirely know where the problem lies.Based on what they know so far, US lawmakers are exploring lo-fi fixes to prevent another of these high-stakes scandals. At the top of … [Read more...]
Netflix’s US Password-Sharing Crackdown Isn’t Happening—Yet
After Netflix Spent years piloting different ways to crack down on password sharing, changes to its United States Help Center page this week seemed to indicate that the streaming giant had finally settled on a plan. But those tweaks quickly disappeared, leaving confusion and concern about potential changes to Netflix's account-sharing policies. Now the company is clarifying that nothing has … [Read more...]
Enter the Hunter Satellites Preparing for Space War
Former US Air Force major Even “Jolly” Rogers is worried about a space war. “Conflict exists on a continuum that begins with competition and ultimately leads into full-scale conflict like what you’re seeing in Ukraine,” he says. The US, he adds, is already “in active competition with Russia and China for freedom of action and dominance of the space domain. And it’s evolving very quickly.”So on … [Read more...]
You Really Need to Update Firefox and Android Right Now
The new year has kicked off with some hefty security updates released by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. January has been a busy time for enterprise patches too, with SAP, VMWare, and Oracle among those issuing security fixes during the month.Here’s everything you need to know about the security fixes released in January.Apple iOS Apple has released iOS 16.3 along with a new … [Read more...]
The Untold Story of a Crippling Ransomware Attack
It was a Sunday morning in mid-October 2020 when Rob Miller first heard there was a problem. The databases and IT systems at Hackney Council, in East London, were suffering from outages. At the time, the UK was heading into its second deadly wave of the coronavirus pandemic, with millions living under lockdown restrictions and normal life severely disrupted. But for Miller, a strategic director at … [Read more...]
A Link to News Site Meduza Can (Technically) Land You in Russian Prison
When you run a major app, all it takes is one mistake to put countless people at risk. Such is the case with Diksha, a public education app run by India’s Ministry of Education that exposed the personal information of around 1 million teachers and millions of students across the country. The data, which included things like full names, email addresses, and phone numbers, was publicly … [Read more...]
ADS-B Exchange, the Flight Tracker That Powered @ElonJet, Sold to Jetnet
A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious.ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking “billionaires and baddies.” But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired … [Read more...]
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