Wired Security Spoken Edition

You know what they say, the first hacks of January set the tone for the rest of year. (Wait, no one has ever said that.) But with that in mind, we tried to bring you mostly good news this week. First up, we explained why Tor, that wondrous anonymizer, is now easier to use than ever. As the world descends further into digital authoritarianism, anonymity networks like Tor become even more important. And thanks to a slew of improvements last year, Tor has become accessible for just about everyone. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In an extensive series of tweets throughout December, hackers leaked sensitive data from hundreds of German politicians, including members of the European parliament, German parliament, and regional state parliaments. The move reflects an insidious strategy criminals and hacktivists sometimes use to expose and endanger targets by leaking deeply person details about them and their families. The leaks also impacted Chancellor Angela Merkel to a degree, as well as some journalists and performers. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A year ago today, Intel coordinated with a web of academic and independent researchers to disclose a pair of security vulnerabilities with unprecedented impact. Since then, a core Intel hacking team has worked to help clean up the mess—by creating attacks of their own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You probably know about the digital anonymity service Tor, but for whatever reason you may not actually use it. Maybe between the nodes, traffic rerouting, and special onion URLs it seems too confusing to be worth the effort. In truth, Tor has been relatively accessible for years now, largely because of the Tor Browser, which works almost exactly like a regular browser and does all the complicated stuff for you in the background. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After years of targeted hacks, epic heists, and run of the mill data breaches you might think that institutions would be getting wise to the importance of strong cybersecurity. It seems 2018 was not the year. Here’s WIRED’s look back at the biggest breaches, data exposures, ransomware attacks, state-sponsored campaigns, and general hacks of the year. Stay safe in 2019. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This year thankfully avoided any world-breaking ransomware attacks like NotPetya. It even had some small victories, like GitHub beating back the biggest DDoS attack in history. Still, online threats are manifold, lurking and evolving, making the internet a more hostile place than ever. The biggest threats online continued to mirror the biggest threats in the real world, with nation states fighting proxy battles and civilians bearing the brunt of the assault. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The global conversation around data privacy changed dramatically in March of 2018. That’s when Cambridge Analytica made international headlines. It was the story of a shadowy political firm misappropriating the data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. But really, the story was how Facebook, keeper of 2 billion users' private messages, photos, and social connections, let it happen. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As democracies around the world struggle to hold back the rising tide of authoritarianism, a similar crisis is unfolding online. Three factors converged this year to make 2018 the eighth straight year that global internet freedom declined, according to an annual report from the nonprofit Freedom House: increasing censorship in response to disinformation, the widespread collection of personal data, and a growing group of countries emulating China’s model of digital authoritarianism. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cybersecurity can feel like a chaotic free-for-all sometimes, but it's not every day that a whole new conceptual type of attack crops up. Over the last 15 months, though, cryptojacking has been exactly that. It's officially everywhere, and it's not going away. The concept of cryptojacking is pretty simple: An attacker finds a way to harness the processing power of computers she doesn't own—or pay the electric bills on—to mine cryptocurrency for herself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The week started with bombshell Senate reports on the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election. We dived deep to explain how Russians used meme warfare to divide America, why Instagram was the Internet Research Agency’s go-to social media platform for spreading misinformation, and how Russians specifically targeted black Americans in an effort to exploit racial wounds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The American military is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence, which top officials are convinced will deliver victory in future warfare. But internal Pentagon documents and interviews with senior officials make clear that the Defense Department is reeling from being spurned by a tech giant and struggling to develop a plan that might work in a new sort of battle—for hearts and minds in Silicon Valley. The battle began with an unexpected loss. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Imagine you’re a burglar. You’ve decided to tackle a high-end luxury apartment, the kind of building with multiple Picassos in the penthouse. You could spend weeks casing the place, studying every resident’s schedule, analyzing the lock on every door. You could dig through trash for hints about which units have alarms, run through every permutation of what the codes might be. That’s one way to do it. You could also just steal the super’s keys. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday, the security and anti-phishing firm Area 1 published details of a breach that compromised one of the European Union's diplomatic communication channels for three years. The perpetrators also compromised systems related to the United Nations, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and a number of international foreign affairs ministries. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Phishing scams often come in waves. Last year it was a phony Google Docs link and a convincing Netflix impersonator, both of which had plagued the internet sporadically for months, at least, before seeing big surges. This month, it's a bogus Apple App Store email that convinces its victims to cough up all kinds of personal information. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The contrast could hardly be more striking. In October, Vice President Mike Pence delivered ablistering speechaccusing China of stealing prized US technology and military hardware. Barely two weeks later, one of Beijing’s most powerful bureaucrats touched down in Israel for a visit focused onbuilding tieswith its tech and innovation sectors. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Scott Moore is Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For many women, especially journalists, politicians, and other public figures, Twitter is something to endure. Many have accounts out of professional necessity, but the cost of their participation in Twitter discourse is often abuse, threats, and harassment. Women learn to block, mute, report, and ignore their mentions. Some tweet directly at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, frustrated that he seems never to take the problem of abuse against women on the site seriously. He rarely answers them directly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In May, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement, negotiated by the Obama Administration, designed to keep Iran from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons. As part of that reversal, the Trump administration reimposed economic sanctions on Iran. From the start, the US actions stoked tensions and fear of Iranian retaliation in cyberspace. Now, some see signs that the pushback has arrived. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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If you thought you were going to make it out of 2018 without a couple more data slip-ups, think again! Two incidents bookended the week. Monday, Google revealed that a bug in its somehow still alive Google+ social network exposed the data of 52.5 million users. That's orders of magnitude bigger than the 500,000 users that were impacted by a previous Google+ exposure. And on Friday, Facebook announced that it had exposed photos of up to 6.8 million users for nearly two weeks in September. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you haven’t heard, 2018 was extremely bad for Facebook. The company was rocked by so many scandals that it’s become hard to list them all in one place. I won’t try here, but I will say it’s equally difficult to determine how much those missteps really matter to Facebook’s billions of users. During a one-day event in New York City on Thursday, the social network got a chance to find out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices