Security, Spoken

The week began with a tricky Google Calendar phishing scam, and ended with Iran ramping up its cyberattacks against the US, as talk of war with that nation mounts. That, as they say, escalated quickly. Before things took a turn for the geopolitical, we walked you through a dead simple way to stop data breaches with... database encryption. We explained why Google is getting retro when it comes to ways to encrypt data sets.

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In 2013, Amy Krekelberg received an unsettling notice from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources: An employee had abused his access to a government driver’s license database and snooped on thousands of people in the state, mostly women. Krekelberg learned that she was one of them.

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Certain studies require sensitive datasets: the relationship between nutritious school lunch and student health, the effectiveness of salary equity initiatives, and so on. Valuable insights require navigating a minefield of private, personal information. Now, after years of work, cryptographers and data scientists at Google have come up with a technique to enable this "multi-party computation" without exposing information to anyone who didn't already have it.

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Not so long ago, companies that cracked personal devices on behalf of governments did so in secret, closely guarding even the descriptions of their capabilities. Now, it seems, they proudly tweet about their updated abilities to hack into new iPhones, like a video game firm offering an expansion pack.

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At this point, you're probably keeping an eye out for possible phishing messages in your email. You know the drill: If you have any doubts, don't click links or download attachments. That's difficult enough to adhere to in practice. Now, thanks to new findings from the threat intelligence firm Kaspersky, along with phishing texts, phishing tweets, and phishing pop-ups, you need to worry about one more thing: phishing in your calendar.

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Data breaches and exposures have been so rampant over the last few years that it's difficult to even keep track at this point, much less step back to mull a solution. But, perhaps out of necessity, researchers from the database giant MongoDB have spent the last two years developing a new database encryption scheme aimed squarely at reducing these damaging incidents. Their secret weapon? Radical simplicity. The idea of encrypting databases in various ways isn't new.

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There's a new scam getting after your Google Calendar, you can now control TVs with your eyes, and it's time to get your smorgasbord of cell phone photos organized. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every week day? Sign up here! Today's Headlines A tricky scam plants phishing links in your calendar You hopefully already know to avoid phishing emails ... and texts ... and popups .

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There's a new battleground in the browser wars: user privacy. Firefox just made its Enhanced Tracking Protection a default feature, Apple continues to pile privacy-focused features into its Safari browser, and people are more aware than ever before of the sort of information they can reveal every time they set a digital footprint on the web. If you want to push back against online tracking, you've got several options to pick from when choosing a default browser.

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It’s mid June, and according to tradition, the news cycle is supposed to be lethargic, cooling off in a hammock somewhere and taking it easy. Not so much this week. It started off well enough: On Sunday we explained how to actually, finally stop all those robocalls---or at least slow them down. But then Monday hit, and the US government confirmed that hackers had stolen a border agency database full of traveler photos.

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Amazon cloned an entire neighborhood, a dangerous hacker group takes aim at the US electrical grid, and the world remembers a running great. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less.

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