Security, Spoken

It's not every day that security researchers discover a new state-sponsored hacking group. Even rarer is the emergence of one whose spyware has 80 distinct components, capable of strange and unique cyberespionage tricks—and who's kept those tricks under wraps for more than five years.

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On Friday night, Microsoft sent notification emails to an unknown number of its individual email users—across Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail—warning them about a data breach. Between January 1 and March 28 of this year, hackers used a set of stolen credentials for a Microsoft customer support platform to access account data like email addresses in messages, message subject lines, and folder names inside accounts. By Sunday, it acknowledged that the problem was actually much worse.

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The Mueller report has been sitting in the Justice Department for nearly two weeks. Attorney general William Barr told Congress Wednesday he’s hoping the public will finally get a look at the 300-plus page document sometime within the next week, ending a bizarre period of dissembling and fumbling by Barr that has left America with more questions than answers about the seriousness of what Mueller uncovered.

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It was another busy week in the security world, and perhaps the biggest story was the arrest of Julian Assange in London on Thursday. The WikiLeaks founder is facing criminal charges in the US over allegations that he conspired to help Chelsea Manning hack into Pentagon computer networks nine years ago. It’s hardly an open-and-shut case, which Andy Greenberg broke down shortly after the indictment was unsealed.

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Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Julian Assange charged with computer hacking. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested today in London and faces hacking charges from the US government. The indictment, which was unsealed today, centers around an allegation that Assange promised to help then Army-private Chelsea Manning gain access to classified materials.

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If you use a smart speaker, you know all of the conveniences and delights that make it more than just a glorified paper weight. But, admit it, you've probably given it some privacy side-eye from time to time. After all, it is a microphone that just sits in your house waiting for a wake word to start recording what you say. Here's how to tighten the reins on what Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri can hear, when, and how it gets used. It's a good time to take stock.

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For the first time since 2012, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange no longer has the legal protections of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. He now faces the criminal charges he's always suspected and feared—although it's now clear that he's accused of criminal behavior not as a journalist, or even a spy, but a hacker. On Thursday, London's metropolitan police physically dragged Assange out of his residence at the embassy and into a police van.

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Over the past few years, scammers have increasingly siphoned cash off of digital payment networks, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars so far. Not only is the problem hard to contain; new findings show that it's evolving and maturing, with new types of ATM malware on the rise. Researchers at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in Singapore are presenting findings on Wednesday about a new wave of payment system scams.

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Private companies around the world have evolved a gray industry supplying digital surveillance and hacking tools to governments and local law enforcement. As the once little-known practice has grown, so too has the resulting malware. Researchers have now found that one of these spyware products, which had previously been found on the Google Play Store, also targeted iOS.

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When the malware known both as Triton and Trisis came to light in late 2017, it quickly gained a reputation as perhaps the world's most dangerous piece of code: the first ever designed to disable the safety systems that protect industrial facilities from potentially lethal physical accidents. But Triton hackers still have to engage in a far more common forms of hacking to plant that code, in some cases spending close to a year digging their way through IT networks before they reach their targets.

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