Security, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

The A-B-C’s of Keeping Your Kids Safe Online Dec 12, 2017

Show notes

If the web were an amusement park attraction, you’d have to be 10 feet tall to ride—it's terrifying enough for adults and a funhouse of horrors for kids, from inappropriate content to unkind comment sections to outright predators. And yet! The internet also affords opportunities to learn, to socialize, to create. Besides, at this point trying to keep your kids off of it entirely would be like keeping them away from electricity or indoor plumbing. They’re going to get online.

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Take These 7 Steps Now to Reach Password Perfection Dec 11, 2017

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Your passwords are a first line of defense against many internet ills, but few people actually treat them that way: Whether it’s leaning on lazy Star Wars references or repeating across all of your accounts—or both—everyone is guilty of multiple password sins. But while they’re an imperfect security solution to begin with, putting in your best effort will provide an immediate security boost. Don’t think of the following tips as suggestions.

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Evidence That Ethiopia Is Spying on Journalists Shows Commercial Spyware Is Out of Control Dec 11, 2017

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Throughout 2016 and 2017, individuals in Canada, United States, Germany, Norway, United Kingdom, and numerous other countries began to receive suspicious emails. It wasn’t just common spam. These people were chosen. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ronald Deibert (@rondeibert) is professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. The emails were specifically designed to entice each individual to click a malicious link.

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North Korea's Latest Missile Test Was Even Scarier Than It Seemed Dec 08, 2017

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When North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile on Tuesday, analysts quickly determined that the weapon would be able to reach any target in the continental United States. Further photo and video analysis since, though, indicate that the missile test represents an even greater advance in capabilities than analysts first thought.

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A Tiny New Chip Could Secure the Next Generation of IoT Dec 07, 2017

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The Internet of Things security crisis persists, as billions of inadequately secured webcams, refrigerators, and more flood homes around the world. But IoT security researchers at Microsoft Research have their eye on an even larger problem: the billions of gadgets that already run on simple microcontrollers—small, low-power computers on a single chip—that will gradually gain connectivity over the years, exponentially expanding the internet of things population.

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‘Mailsploit’ Lets Hackers Forge Perfect Email Spoofs Dec 07, 2017

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Pretending to be someone you're not in an email has never been quite hard enough—hence phishing, that eternal scourge of internet security. But now one researcher has dug up a new collection of bugs in email programs that in many cases strip away even the existing, imperfect protections against email impersonation, allowing anyone to undetectably spoof a message with no hint at all to the recipient.

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Ghostery Deploys AI in the Fight Against Ad Trackers Dec 06, 2017

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Most ad blockers—and there are so, so many of them now—operate roughly the same way, comparing the scripts they encounter on a given site to their whitelist and block list letting the former run and stopping the others. This means they largely share the same drawback, as well; they can’t block what they’ve never seen before. With its latest release, popular ad blocker Ghostery attempts to solve that common dilemma, with a fashionable solution: artificial intelligence.

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Phishing Schemes Are Using Encrypted Sites to Seem Legit Dec 06, 2017

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A massive effort to encrypt web traffic over the last few years has made green padlocks and "https" addresses increasingly common; more than half the web now uses internet encryption protocols to keep data protected from prying eyes as it travels back and forth between sites and browsers. But as with any sweeping reform, the progress also comes with some new opportunities for fraud. And phishers are loving HTTPS.

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Here's the NSA Agent Who Inexplicably Exposed Critical Secrets Dec 05, 2017

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A series of leaks has rocked the National Security Agency over the past few years, resulting in digital spy tools strewn across the web that have caused real damage both inside and outside the agency. Many of the breaches have been relatively simple to carry out, often by contractors like the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who employed just a USB drive and some chutzpah.

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Security News This Week: A New Bill Wants Jail Time for Execs Who Hide Data Breaches Dec 05, 2017

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It's been a rough week for a lot of people, but particularly for Apple. On Tuesday, a security researcher tweeted information about a dire bug in the company's macOS High Sierra operating system that allowed anyone being prompted for system user credentials to bypass the authentication by simply typing "root" as the username and leaving the password blank. Apple rushed to push out a necessary update on Wednesday, but botched it a bit; if you hadn't yet updated to macOS 10.13.

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