Technology As It Happens
May has been another busy month of security updates, with Google’s Chrome browser and Android operating system, Zoom, and Apple’s iOS releasing patches to fix serious vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, things have…
For more than a decade, North Korean hackers and digital scammers have run wild, pilfering hundreds of millions of dollars to raise funds for the Hermit Kingdom and often leaving…
After another week of dismally tragic news and moral failures by the powerful, it’s good to know that you can at least depend on the small things, like “privacy-focused” search…
You are not the only person irritated by those pesky cookie permissions boxes. If you click “Accept” by rote, you have no idea what you’re agreeing to. Or perhaps you…
More than 40 Democratic members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data that prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions. “We are…
For the best part of a decade, US officials and cybersecurity companies have been naming and shaming hackers they believe work for the Chinese government. These hackers have stolen terabytes…
On the morning of August 6, 2019, merchants along Apliu Street unbolted the padlocks to their metal stalls and heaved open the heavy gates to their stores. They had resumed…
In late 2019, the government of New South Wales in Australia rolled out digital driver’s licenses. The new licenses allowed people to use their iPhone or Android device to show…
Since its founding in 2014, ProtonMail has become synonymous with user-friendly encrypted email. Now the company is trying to be synonymous with a whole lot more. On Wednesday morning, it…
An open source panopticon—from commercial big data aggregation to information infrastructure across mobile, smart devices, and social media—is reshaping the way intelligence is collected and used in conventional war. Open…
In the three weeks since a draft opinion leaked from the United States Supreme Court promising to roll back the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States, reproductive…
One thousand four hundred and fifty-nine days have passed since data rights nonprofit NOYB fired off its first complaints under Europe’s flagship data regulation, GDPR. The complaints allege Google, WhatsApp,…
When it comes to Facebook, most of us will have a contacts list covering years and even decades of our lives—recent acquaintances among people we’ve known since high school, neighbors…
As Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine heads towards its hundredth day, opposition from Ukrainian forces is as strong as ever. At the same time, hacktivists all around the world continue…
NSO Group and its powerful Pegasus malware have dominated the debate over commercial spyware vendors who sell their hacking tools to governments, but researchers and tech companies are increasingly sounding…
Robocalls have become a modern scourge, the destroyer of focus, the nuisance that somehow cannot be eradicated. But perhaps they can, at least, be repurposed to strike a very small…
When you turn off an iPhone, it doesn’t fully power down. Chips inside the device continue to run in a low-power mode that makes it possible to locate lost or…
Cryptocurrencies have long been seen as the Wild West of money transfers, but few online payment and money transfer platforms have been as blatant in appealing for illicit cash as…
A group of human rights lawyers and investigators called on the Hague this week to bring what would be the first ever “cyber war crimes” charges. The group is urging…
Not long after Russia steamrolled into South Ossetia in 2008, effectively annexing the territory of its southern neighbor, a group of Georgians banded together to set up a new Russian-language…
A new partnership between the cybersecurity nonprofit Bioeconomy Information Sharing and Analysis Center (BIO-ISAC) and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which works on emerging research with US…
For weeks, evidence has been piling up of the Russian military’s apparent war crimes in the midst of its brutal invasion of Ukraine: mass graves, bombed hospitals, even makeshift torture…
For years, Android’s security and privacy teams have been wrestling the world’s most popular mobile operating system to make it more controllable and updatable while still being open source and…
All your WhatsApp photos, iMessage texts, and Snapchat videos could be scanned to check for child sexual abuse images and videos under newly proposed European rules. The plans, experts warn,…
When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or…
An unusual partnership between Google and AMD may offer a blueprint for how the tech industry can better tackle processor security risks before they spiral out of control. The only…
It’s Friday morning and you think you can meet an important end-of-week work deadline if you just focus and plow through for the next eight hours. Skip lunch? Check. Turn…
If the war in Ukraine and Russia’s still-unfolding atrocities there didn’t offer enough fodder for doomscrolling, this week supplied a new dose of domestic crisis: A leaked Supreme Court draft…
Nothing makes you more paranoid about privacy than working in a marketing department. Trust me on this. For example, did you know that marketers track every time you open an…
In the snowy streets of the north Ukrainian town of Trostyanets, the Russian missile system fires rockets every second. Tanks and military vehicles are parked on either side of the…
A leaked United States Supreme Court draft opinion published by Politico on Monday and soon after authenticated by Chief Justice John Roberts is a blaring signal that the Court will…
VPN companies are squaring up for a fight with the Indian government over new rules designed to change how they operate in the country. On April 28, officials announced that…
A federal judge has ordered all internet service providers in the United States to block three pirate streaming services operated by Doe defendants who never showed up to court and…
On April 7, Ranendra Ojha, a marketing professional in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata was looking forward to installing and using the new super app, Tata Neu. Super apps…
The leak of a seismic draft opinion from the US Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade has somehow managed overnight to elicit roughly equal outpourings of anger from…
For many years, Windows users had to rely on a third-party security tool to keep viruses and malware at bay, but now Microsoft’s operating system comes with its own package,…
Surprising news abounded this week as Ukrainian officials weigh next steps in their digital campaigns against Russia, given that their efforts so far have been unexpectedly successful, if sometimes controversial.…
A cryptocurrency platform was recently on the receiving end of one of the biggest distributed denial of service attacks ever recorded, after threat actors bombarded it with 15.3 million requests,…
April has been a big month for security updates, including emergency patches for Apple’s iOS and Google Chrome to fix vulnerabilities already being used by attackers. Microsoft has released important…
When Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February, the world expected Moscow’s cyber and information operations to pummel the country alongside air strikes and shelling.…
A group of over two dozen film studios has repeatedly taken popular VPN providers to court, sometimes extracting judgements worth millions of dollars in damages. While piracy remains the central…
The orders are issued like clockwork. Every day, often at around 5 am local time, the Telegram channel housing Ukraine’s unprecedented “IT Army” of hackers buzzes with a new list…
For most of the world, the common practice of “rooting” or “jailbreaking” a phone allows the device’s owner to install apps and software tweaks that break the restrictions of Apple’s…
Elon Musk Secured an agreement on Monday to buy Twitter for about $44 billion and take the company private. In his initial comments about the move, Musk discussed a range…
Source: Wired – Security
Ross Ulbricht, the convicted creator of the legendary Silk Road dark web market for drugs, has never gotten much mercy from the US legal system. In 2015, he was sentenced…
Previously unknown “zero-day” software vulnerabilities are mysterious and intriguing as a concept. But they’re even more noteworthy when hackers are spotted actively exploiting the novel software flaws in the wild…
Netflix has been trying to crack down on password sharing for more than a decade. But in the last year, and more strongly this week, the company has given serious…
As ransomware attacks across the United States and around the world reached a fever pitch in 2021, private companies and governments made their most extensive promises yet to address and…
Two weeks after FBI agents surged through a luxury apartment building in Washington, DC, and arrested two men who allegedly spent years pretending to be Homeland Security officers, the case…