Wired Security Spoken Edition

In December, WIRED took stock of then 17 known criminal investigations swirling around Donald Trump, Russia’s role in the 2016 election, and Trump’s network of businesses and business partners—probes by not just Special Counsel Robert Mueller but by at least a half-dozen other federal, state, and local investigators. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two years ago, as Nebraska was considering a “right to repair” bill designed to make it easier for consumers to fix their own gadgets, an Apple lobbyist made a frightening prediction. If the state passed the legislation, it would turn into a haven for hackers, Steve Kester told then-state senator Lydia Brasch. He argued the law would inadvertently give bad actors the opportunity to break into devices like smartphones. The bill was later shelved, in part because of industry pressure. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

By now we’re all familiar with the battle tactics in Game of Thrones: Confront your enemy head on—usually in some nicely arrayed lines—and hack at them until no one’s left alive or someone has won. It’s a tried and true method, with little in the way of actual operational depth. And as Sunday night’s Battle of Winterfell showed, it's particularly ineffective against an endless army of the undead. Spoilers ahead, obviously. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The week in security news began much as you’d expect: still trying to make sense of the redacted Mueller report, which was released to congress late last week. Garrett M. Graff’s takeaways? The report makes clear that Trump was worse than a “useful idiot,” along with 14 other insights you may have missed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Around a year ago, André Tenreiro was called into a meeting between the chief technology officer of the phone carrier he worked for—one of the largest in Mozambique—and an executive of the country's largest bank. The latter had seen an escalating pattern of fraud based on so-called SIM swap attacks, where hackers trick or bribe a phone company employee into switching the SIM card associated with a victim's phone number. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You’ve seen the ads in your email or online: Celebrities supposedly hawking miracle weight loss cures or galaxy brain supplements. They’re at this point endemic to the web, as deeply ingrained as hashtags and puppies. But even though plenty of people fall for them, no one ever really does anything about it. Of all the security threats online, spam ranks pretty low on the priority list. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in January, approximately 1,000 Robert Mueller news-cycles ago, I argued that given the arc of the special counsel Russia probe, it’d be embarrassing for Donald Trump if he weren’t an agent of the Russian intelligence: “We’ve reached a point in the Mueller probe where there are only two scenarios left,” I wrote at the time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Democrats in Washington found themselves Friday confronting an unwelcome surprise conclusion following the release of the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller: Maybe we should impeach President Trump after all. Ever since taking back the House of Representatives in January, Democratic leaders have carefully modulated the demands for impeachment from their activist base. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After a series of bombings killed over 300 people in Sri Lanka Easter Sunday, the country’s government blocked access to social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and the chat app Viber, according to state media and independent organizations that monitor internet blocks. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Netflix made a splash when it debuted Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in December, a "choose your own adventure"-style movie that put viewers in charge of their cinematic destiny. It has since invested in even more interactive programming, including a live-action show featuring survivalist Bear Grylls. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Robert Mueller’s final 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election—and Donald Trump’s apparent attempts to obstruct justice along the way—takes some time to read fully. On close examination, it turns out to be a deeply compelling document, full of tantalizing revelations and details. Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada called the Mueller Report “the best book by far on the workings of the Trump presidency. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After months of anticipation and fevered speculation by supporters and critics alike, the public finally laid eyes on the most important release of the past 25 years, its secrets guarded by a famously tight-lipped team up until the very end. That's right, Beyoncé dropped a new album this week. Scholars will analyze its influence for years to come. Robert Mueller's report also came out, at least in redacted form. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week kicked off a new, chaotic era at the Department of Homeland Security, where the only certainty seems to be the president’s obsession with immigration. As former Customs and Border Protection commissioner and prominent family-separation advocate Kevin McAleenan takes over as acting secretary, it’s fair to wonder what will happen to the rest of DHS’s many essential responsibilities. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: The Mueller Report is much worse for Trump than Barr let on The full (but redacted) Mueller Report is finally here, in its 448 pages of glory. There are lots of takeaways, but the bottom line is the report is much more damaging to Trump than Trump-appointed attorney general William Barr initially said. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On March 22, special counsel Robert Mueller turned in his long-anticipated report on Russian interference in the 2016 election—and the question of whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice. Now you can read the whole thing for yourself. Or at least what’s left of it, after attorney general William Barr’s redactions. Barr had initially released a brief summary of the report’s key findings in a four-page letter he sent to Congress on March 24. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The discovery of a new, sophisticated team of hackers spying on dozens of government targets is never good news. But one team of cyberspies has pulled off that scale of espionage with a rare and troubling trick, exploiting a weak link in the internet's cybersecurity that experts have warned about for years: DNS hijacking, a technique that meddles with the fundamental address book of the internet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Until a few weeks ago, sinmed was one of the largest drug vendors at Dream Market, the foremost dark web bazaar. It took in millions of dollars shipping fentanyl-laced heroin, methamphetamines, and hundreds of thousands of counterfeit Xanax tablets across the US—until the New York district attorney's office shut it down, and arrested the three men who allegedly ran it. Dark web takedowns happen all the time. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When Ivan Medvedev joined Google as a privacy engineering manager in 2013, the company had rogue data anxiety. Its user base and set of services had become so massive that it seemed inevitable that sensitive data could accidentally crop up in unexpected places, like customers filing support tickets with more personal information than necessary. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's not every day that security researchers discover a new state-sponsored hacking group. Even rarer is the emergence of one whose spyware has 80 distinct components, capable of strange and unique cyberespionage tricks—and who's kept those tricks under wraps for more than five years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Friday night, Microsoft sent notification emails to an unknown number of its individual email users—across Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail—warning them about a data breach. Between January 1 and March 28 of this year, hackers used a set of stolen credentials for a Microsoft customer support platform to access account data like email addresses in messages, message subject lines, and folder names inside accounts. By Sunday, it acknowledged that the problem was actually much worse. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices