Security, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

Why One Secure Platform Passed on Two-Factor Authentication Oct 28, 2019

Show notes

When you think of online security, hopefully by now two-factor authentication springs to mind. WIRED certainly pushes the feature every chance we get. And for good reason! It's a solid protection against common web attacks like phishing and credential stuffing. But when Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, who previously cofounded OKCupid, launched their own digital identity and encrypted chat platform in 2014, they decided against using 2FA at all. Which is less radical than it sounds.

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Flock Safety Says Its License Plate Readers Reduce Crime. It’s Not That Simple Oct 25, 2019

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In March, police in an Atlanta suburb embarked on a surveillance experiment they hoped would reduce crime in the area. Along public roads near the local Six Flags amusement park, officers from the Cobb County Police Department installed 13 solar-powered automatic license plate readers from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based startup on a mission to “eliminate non-violent crime.

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A Republican Raid, NASA's Venus Plans, and More News Oct 25, 2019

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Politicians are bickering and NASA is tinkering, but first: a cartoon tackling the problem of robot discrimination. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

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Total SCIF Show: The GOP's Raid Puts National Security at Risk Oct 24, 2019

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It should go without saying: Don’t round up a bunch of your buddies and jostle your way into a highly secured government facility uninvited. But that's exactly what a group of Republican congressmen proudly did this morning. “BREAKING,” representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) tweeted at 11:32 am, “I led over 30 of my colleagues into the SCIF where Adam Schiff is holding secret impeachment depositions.

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A Controversial Plan to Encrypt More of the Internet Oct 24, 2019

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The security community generally agrees on the importance of encrypting private data: Add a passcode to your smartphone. Use a secure messaging app like Signal. Adopt HTTPS web encryption. But a new movement to encrypt a fundamental internet mechanism, promoted by browser heavyweights like Google Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox, has sparked a heated controversy. The changes center around the Domain Name System, a decentralized directory that acts essentially as the internet's address book.

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Security News This Week: The Air Force Finally Ditches Its Nuclear Command Floppy Disks Oct 23, 2019

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The first thing you should read about cybersecurity this week, if you somehow haven't already, is this in-depth look at Olympic Destroyer, the malware that plagued the Pyeongchang Olympics. An excerpt from WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg's upcoming book Sandworm, the feature from our November issue details how investigators figured out who was behind the attack—a trickier puzzle to solve than you might think.

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How to Control the Privacy of Your Social Media Posts Oct 23, 2019

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Posting an update to Instagram doesn't have to mean sharing your life with every single person you've befriended there. In fact, all of the major social apps give you more granular control than you might realize. If you want to set up a private, select group of people to show off photos of your baby to—or to keep your most raucous nights out a secret from—you can do so without resorting to emails or group chats.

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A Brief History of Russian Hackers' Evolving False Flags Oct 22, 2019

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Deception has always been part of the hacker playbook. But it's one thing for intruders to hide their tracks, and another to adopt an invented identity, or even frame another country for a cyberattack. Russia's hackers have done all of the above, and now gone one step further: In a series of espionage cases, they hijacked another country's hacking infrastructure, and used it to spy on victims and deliver malware.

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Microsoft's New Plan to Defend the Code Deep Within PCs Oct 22, 2019

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There are lots of ways to hack a PC. You can exploit software vulnerabilities. You can put malware on a USB drive and drop it in a parking lot for some unsuspecting office worker to pick up and plug in. Or you can turn an operating system's features against itself, strategically manipulating them to gain control. But an expanding threat now has Microsoft rethinking some of its most foundational PC defenses.

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The Ukraine Whistle-Blower Did Everything Right Oct 21, 2019

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On August 12, an unidentified whistle-blower filed a complaint, addressed to the chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, concerning the behavior President Donald Trump. Ever since that report became public a week ago, Trump and his defenders have done their best to discredit both its contents and the author. But underneath the increasingly large pile of misinformation, misinterpretation, and outright fabrication sits one simple truth: The whistle-blower did nothing wrong.

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