Wired Security Spoken Edition

The Democratic National Committee has hired Bob Lord, most recently Yahoo's head of information security, to be its chief security officer—a brand new position, created in the aftermath of the historic hack by Russian operatives of the DNC's servers during the 2016 presidential campaign. This is Lord's first foray into the world of politics, having spent his career in Silicon Valley working at companies like Twitter, AOL, and Netscape. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The accidental missile alert in Hawaii earlier this month made real for 38 terrifying minutes the vague, low-level dread that permeates American life today: Nuclear war seems closer and more real than it has in a generation. Even the pope—not exactly a fear-monger—said last week that the world now stood at “the very limit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“EXCLUSIVE: Infowars has obtained and is now releasing the secret FISA memo,” conspiracy theorist Alex Jones blared on Twitter Tuesday. Jones thought he had a mysterious four-page document authored by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, who leads the House Intelligence Committee. The memo purportedly proves that intelligence officials abused surveillance powers authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in investigating Trump’s campaign ties to Russia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, first revealed at the beginning of the year, affect pretty much anything with a chip in it. That ubiquity has made the process of releasing patches understandably arduous. Every type of impacted hardware and software requires its own specially tailored solution, and even a fix that works as intended may slow down system processes as a side effect. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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In the early days of Android, co-founder Andy Rubin set the stage for the fledgling mobile operating system. Android’s mission was to create smarter mobile devices, ones that were more aware of their owner’s behavior and location.“If people are smart,” Rubin told Business Week in 2003, “that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Hawaii reeled after an emergency text alert about an impending nuclear missile attack triggered panic—and then turned out to be a false alarm. Researchers provided more details about the sophisticated Triton malware that targets industrial control systems and impacted a real-world plant last year. The anti-fascist far-left movement known as Antifa gets some of its intelligence from a computer scientist named Megan Squire, who disseminates valuable and controversial information. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A recent digital attack on the control systems of an industrial plant has renewed concerns about the threat hacking poses to critical infrastructure. And while security researchers offered some analysis last month of the malware used in the attack, called Triton or Trisis, newly revealed details of how it works expose just how vulnerable industrial plants—and their failsafe mechanisms—could be to manipulation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On a clear day this summer, security researcher Ang Cui boarded a boat headed to a government biosafety facility off the northeastern tip of Long Island. Cui's security company, Red Balloon, will spend the next year studying how its Internet of Things threat-scanning tool performs on the building control systems of Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The American criminal justice system couldn’t get much less fair. Across the country, some 1.5 million people are locked up in state and federal prisons. More than 600,000 people, the vast majority of whom have yet to be convicted of a crime, sit behind bars in local jails. Black people make up 40 percent of those incarcerated, despite accounting for just 13 percent of the US population. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The world is witnessing the biggest protest movement in Iran since the 2009 Green Movement uprising. Over the last two weeks, there has been unrest in nearly every major Iranian city and dozens of smaller towns. Corruption, economic mismanagement, and neglect are the protesters’ primary grievances, though the chants quickly turned political. Predictably, the government has cracked down: More than 32 people have been killed and at least 3,700 have been detained since the protests began. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was legally collecting millions of Americans’ phone calls and electronic communications—including emails, Facebook messages, and browsing histories—without a warrant. Congress has now decided not only to reauthorize these programs, but also to expand some of their most invasive techniques. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Vacant buildings have their own sort of gravitational pull. When a home gets boarded up on one block, you can almost bet another will follow nearby. Often, they pull whole neighborhoods into their orbit, driving down the local housing market in ever-expanding clusters. Which at least begins to explain why Baltimore has tapped Tamás Budavári, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, to study their patterns. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The fallout of the widespread Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities continued this week. WIRED took an in-depth look at the parallel sagas that caused four research teams to independently discover the bugs within months of each other. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the citizens of Hawaii came out of hiding in their bathtubs and basements Saturday morning, after learning that the emergency alert they had received, warning of an imminent nuclear missile attack, was a false alarm, their fear and panic transformed into rage. "I'm extremely angry right now. People should lose their jobs if this was an error," Hawaii State Representative Matt Lopresti told CNN. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the early days of 2018, the engineering team at the mobile services company Branch noticed slowdowns and errors with its Amazon Web Services cloud servers. An unexpected round of AWS server reboots in December had already struck Ian Chan, Branch's director of engineering, as odd. But the server slowdowns a few weeks later presented a more pressing concern. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As flying, camera-wielding machines get ever cheaper and more ubiquitous, inventors of anti-drone technologies are marketing every possible idea for protection from hovering eyes in the sky: Drone-spotting radar. Drone-snagging shotgun shells. Anti-drone lasers, falcons, even drone-downing drones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Skype has more than 300 million monthly users, making it one of the most popular chat platforms in the world. Now, they'll all be able to benefit from a crucial privacy protection: Microsoft announced Thursday that Skype will offer end-to-end encryption for audio calls, text, and multimedia messages through a feature called Private Conversations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Wednesday, in the wake of Russia's December ban from the 2018 Winter Olympics, a Russia-linked group calling itself "Fancy Bears" published a set of apparently stolen emails. They purportedly belong to officials from the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, and third-party groups associated with the organizations. It's not the first time Russia has lashed out at the IOC and the anti-doping agencies in the last few years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices