Wired Security Spoken Edition

After weeks of unrelenting chaos, the cybersecurity world took a little bit of a breather. Well, relatively, anyway. There was still one of the bigger data breaches in recent memory, compliments of UnderArmour. The sportswear company's MyFitnessPal apps suffered a breach of 150 million users' data, including names and passwords. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For over a week, the City of Atlanta has battled a ransomware attack that has caused serious digital disruptions in five of the city's 13 local government departments. The attack has had far-reaching impacts—crippling the court system, keeping residents from paying their water bills, limiting vital communications like sewer infrastructure requests, and pushing the Atlanta Police Department to file paper reports for days. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly three years after a Russian propaganda group infiltrated Facebook and other tech platforms in hopes of seeding chaos in the 2016 US election, Facebook has more fully detailed its plan to protect elections around the world. In a call with reporters Thursday, Facebook executives elaborated on their use of human moderators, third-party fact checkers, and automation to catch fake accounts, foreign interference, fake news, and to increase transparency in political ads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

ISIS has long taken full advantage of secure communication tools, and utilized mainstream communication platforms in unexpected ways. Extremist groups even develop their own software at times to tailor things like encrypted messaging to their specific needs. One such project is the clandestine, unfortunately named communication tool MuslimCrypt, which uses an encryption technique called steganography to spread secret messages. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In its latest drumbeat against the cyber activities of Iran, the US government Friday charged nine Iranian hackers with a massive three-year campaign to penetrate and steal more than 31 terabytes of information—totaling more than $3 billion in intellectual property—from more than 300 American and foreign universities. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As discerning dark web drug dealers and pseudonymous hackers have figured that Bitcoin is not magically private money, many have turned to Monero, a digital coin that promises a far higher degree of anonymity and untraceability baked into its design. But one group of researchers has found that Monero's privacy protections, while better than Bitcoin's, still aren’t the cloak of invisibility they might seem. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wrangling your Facebook privacy settings—fine-tuning what data friends, advertisers, and apps can access—is a slog. The menus are labyrinthine, the wording obtuse. And it turns out that one of them is completely pointless. In fact, it hasn’t worked in years. To be clear: This is not a case of Facebook sneaking one past you, at least not the way you might think. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After months of silence, Tumblr Friday released a list of 84 usernames and their aliases that it says were connected to "state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda campaigns." It's the first time the company has publicly acknowledged what journalists and researchers have known now for months: Russian trolls also used Tumblr to spread their divisive memes and gifs, reportedly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of interactions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Thursday, a report from the Daily Beast alleged that the Guccifer 2.0 hacking persona—famous for leaking data stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016—has been linked to a GRU Russian intelligence agent. What appears to have given Guccifer away: The hacker once failed activate a VPN before logging into a social media account. This slip eventually allowed US investigators to link the persona to a Moscow IP address. In fact, they traced it directly to GRU headquarters. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hard as it is to believe, it was only a week ago that reports first broke—in The Guardian and The Observer, along with The New York Times—that Trump-affiliated data company Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of 50 million unwitting Facebook users to create so-called psychographic political ads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 campaign, and its related company, Strategic Communications Laboratories, pilfered data on 50 million Facebook users and secretly kept it, according to two reports in The New York Times and The Guardian. The apparent misuse of Facebook data—and the social media giant's failure to police it—leave both companies with plenty still to answer for. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the average internet user, Wikipedia operates in the background, its 44 million entries serving as a priceless resource, rarely thought of until you need to know the capital of Azerbaijan. This week, however Wikipedia's volunteer editors and the nonprofit that makes its work possible, the Wikimedia Foundation, suddenly found themselves in the news, tasked once again with providing a ground-level truth for a platform unwilling to provide one of its own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the blockbuster twin security exploits known as Meltdown and Spectre appeared in early 2018, Mozilla was among the first to respond, retroactively changing several behaviors of Firefox to help prevent them. Both attacks rely on using high-speed timing measurements to detect sensitive information, so somewhat counterintuitively, the patches had to decrease the speed of seemingly mundane computations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook has never been particularly good at prioritizing your privacy. Your powers its business, after all. But recent revelations that a firm called Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of 50 million unwitting Facebook users in 2015 has created new sense of urgency for those hoping for some modicum of control over their online life. If you ever needed a wake-up call, this is it. Facebook offers a fairly robust set of tools to control who knows what about you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A virtual private network, that core privacy tool that encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it through a faraway server, has always presented a paradox: Sure, it helps you hide from some forms of surveillance, like your internet service provider's snooping and eavesdroppers on your local network. But it leaves you vulnerable to a different, equally powerful spy: Whoever controls the VPN server you're routing all your traffic through. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Signing up for a Facebook account, or any free online service, comes with an implicit bargain: Use it as much as you want—check your News Feed, like a status, poke a friend—and in return, the company will collect your data, and use it to serve you ads both on Facebook and around the web. But what appears to be a simple exchange has become anything but. This is not a screed about deleting your Facebook account—although if you want to, here's how. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Arguably the biggest news in security this week was also the strangest; a company barely a year old announced a series of AMD vulnerabilities, giving the chip company only a day or so advance notice before making the results public. And despite the hype, the bugs themselves were of questionable severity. It was almost as hard to make sense of as YouTube's decision to add Wikipedia links to controversial videos. Almost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hacker Adrian Lamo died at the age of 37, according a Facebook post from his father. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son,” Mario Lamo wrote in a post to the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Facebook Group. The cause of death is not yet known, but a coroner in Sedgwick County, Kansas confirmed the news to ZDNet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the early morning of September 9, 2016, Bill Moore, CEO of the Austin-based walkie-talkie app company Zello, contacted the Middle East Media Research Institute. He was seeking a copy of a report MEMRI had recently published describing how ISIS members and supporters were using Zello, which allows people to send voice messages to each other in private and also public channels. Moore had learned about the findings through a Google Alert. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In its first 14 months, the Trump administration has earned a reputation for being soft on the Kremlin, even as the extent of the chaos Russia's hackers and trolls have inflicted online becomes increasingly clear. But more recently, the White House's rhetoric towards Russia has begun to shift. And now the executive branch has not only called out the Kremlin for a broad collection of rogue actions online, but finally meted out a concrete financial punishment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices