Security, Spoken

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I handed my iPhone to my wife and asked her to help with with a privacy experiment. She would use my handset to track my location for the next few days, and with only the software I already had installed. Like a lot of couples, my wife and I know each other's phone PINs. So I left her with the device as I walked into our bathroom to take a shower, simulating an opportunity that I figured would present itself daily to snooping spouses.

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Ransomware has no shortage of cautionary tales and wakeup calls from the past decade. But for local governments, this past year has been a particularly brutal reminder of the threat.

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As we approach the July 4 holiday, the security world had no shortage of fireworks—starting with a hacker group, likely from China, that has spent years breaking into carriers in an effort to hoover up metadata from prime targets. Russia gets most of the attention lately, but never count out China's sophistication and verve. Also never count out Excel as a popular target for hackers.

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In a weeks-long stretch in 2014, hackers stole thousands of dollars a day in cryptocurrency from owners. In 2017, internet outages cropped up around the United States for hours. Last year, Google Cloud suffered hours of disruptions. Earlier this month, a large swath of European mobile data was rerouted through the state-backed China Telecom. And on Monday, websites and services around the world—including the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare—experienced hours of outages.

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On February 22, cybersecurity researcher Filippo Cavallarin told Apple that he had found a bug in macOS. Left unchecked, the vulnerability could let malware slip past the operating system’s Gatekeeper security feature ndetected. According to Cavallarin, Apple said it would fix the problem by mid-May.

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You probably think of Microsoft's classic spreadsheet program Excel as mostly boring. Sure, it can wrangle data, but it's not exactly Apex Legends. For hackers, though, it's a lot of fun. Like the rest of the Office 365 suite, attackers often manipulate Excel to launch their digital strikes. And two recent findings demonstrate how the program's own legitimate features can be used against it.

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Like many people, I use Venmo to pay for stuff: to split the check at dinner, to send my roommate my portion of the utility bills each month, to reimburse friends for concert tickets. It's a useful app for sending and receiving money, regardless of who you bank with. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Dan Salmon is a masters graduate from Minnesota State University who specializes in information security.

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For anyone who's worried that their phone might be hacked to track their location, who they call and when, and other metadata that describes the intimate details of their life, one cyberespionage group has provided a reminder that hackers don't necessarily even need to reach out to your device to gain that access. It may be far easier and more efficient for sophisticated stalkers to penetrate a mobile provider, and use its data to surveil whichever customers they please.

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According to recent polling, Americans view malicious cyber activity as their top security concern—ahead of the economy, nuclear threats, and ISIL. This fear is well-justified. Within the last couple of years, there have been cyberattacks in the United States against the electoral system, the financial industry, the power grid, and hospitals.

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When two countries begin to threaten war in 2019, it's a safe bet that they've already been hacking each other's networks.

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