Security, Spoken

It's a rule of thumb in cybersecurity that the more sensitive your system, the less you want it to touch the internet. But as the US hunkers down to limit the spread of Covid-19, cybersecurity measures presents a difficult technical challenge to working remotely for employees at critical infrastructure, intelligence agencies, and anywhere else with high-security networks. In some cases, working from home isn't an option at all.

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You'd think that mammography machines, radiology systems, and ultrasounds would maintain the strictest possible security hygiene. But new research shows that a whopping 83 percent of medical imaging devices run on operating systems that are so old they no longer receive any software updates at all. That issue is endemic to Internet of Things devices generally, many of which aren't designed to receive software improvements or offer only a complicated path to doing so.

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Since Russia’s stunning influence operations during the 2016 United States presidential race, state and federal officials, researchers, and tech companies have been on high alert for a repeat performance. With the 2020 election now just seven months away, though, newly surfaced social media posts indicate that Russia’s Internet Research Agency is adapting its methods to circumvent those defenses.

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Over the past few years, owners of cars with keyless start systems have learned to worry about so-called relay attacks, in which hackers exploit radio-enabled keys to steal vehicles without leaving a trace. Now it turns out that many millions of other cars that use chip-enabled mechanical keys are also vulnerable to high-tech theft.

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Opening email attachments from untrusted senders has long been one of the easiest ways to get hacked. But unlike other common security screw-ups—using "password" for your password, downloading pirated software from shady websites—there's no practical way for a modern human to avoid opening the occasional mystery-meat attachment. Now one technologist has produced a solution.

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This is a story about something that could have gone wrong on the internet this week but instead turned out mostly OK. How often can you say that? Around nine o’clock on the East Coast on Friday, February 28, bad news arrived on the doorstep of Let’s Encrypt. An arm of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, Let’s Encrypt is a so-called certificate authority that lets websites implement encrypted connections at no cost.

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As the novel coronavirus continues to propagate, phishing scams that pose as Covid-19 advice do as well. The trend started over a month ago, but it's only going to get worse. Abide by these tips to avoid them, and also please keep washing those hands. In non-pandemic news, researchers figured out how to clone the mechanical keys of tens of millions of cars from Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia, making theft a much simpler matter.

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A bipartisan pair of US senators today introduced long-rumored legislation known as the EARN IT Act. Meant to combat child sexual exploitation online, the bill threatens to erode established protections against holding tech companies responsible for what people do and say on their platforms. It also poses the most serious threat in years to strong end-to-end encryption.

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In 2003, security researchers Katie Moussouris and a colleague at enterprise security firm @stake—which would later be acquired by Symantec—found a bad flaw in an encrypted flash drive from Lexar. It was trivial to uncover the password that decrypted the drive's data. But when they tried to let Lexar know? "Things went wrong," says Chris Wyspol, who was also working at @stake at the time.

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For years, North Korea's Lazarus Group hackers have plundered and pillaged the global internet, scamming and infecting digital devices around the world for espionage, profit, and sabotage. One of their weapons of choice: a so-called loader that allows them to clandestinely run a diverse array of malware on targeted Macs with hardly a trace. But Lazarus didn't create the loader on its own. The group seems to have found it laying around online, and repurposed it to elevate their attacks.

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