Security, Spoken

As the founder and director of a nonprofit animal shelter on the East Coast, Alana has spent most of the past decade caring for pets that might otherwise be euthanized. Her work also resonates with people online—the Facebook page for the shelter has more than 1.3 million followers. But in August, she noticed something strange: A series of unfamiliar posts began appearing on the page, and no one at the shelter could say where they were coming from.

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Though sporadic hacker intrusions and phishing campaigns targeted political entities in the lead-up to November's midterm elections, things seemed pretty quiet overall on the election-meddling front in the US. Certainly no leaks or theatrics rose to the level of Russia's actions during the 2016 presidential election. But a belatedly revealed breach of the National Republican Congressional Committee shows just how bad the attack on the 2018 election really was.

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It sounds good in theory. A bill introduced last week by two members of the New York City Council would punish people who send harassing, sexually explicit photos and videos with up to a year of jail time or a $1,000 fine. One unfortunately growing trend the bill hopes to thwart? "Cyber flashing," a type of digital harassment where creeps use Apple's AirDrop feature to send dick pics and other lewd images straight to the home screens of unsuspecting strangers via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

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The push to encrypt traffic throughout the web has resulted in safer and more secure browsing across millions of sites. But not everywhere uses the so-called Transport Layer Security that keeps HTTPS-enabled sites safe from prying eyes. Including, it turns out, Apple’s iTunes and iOS App Store infrastructure, which runs its downloads over unencrypted connections. Typically you can tell when a website uses HTTPS encryption by the little green padlock on the left side of the URL bar.

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By now, you’ve probably heard of PewDiePie, a Swedish comedian and video game commentator who has been the most followed creator on YouTube for years. But you might not be as familiar with T-Series, an almost equally popular Indian media company. For months, T-Series and PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, have been dueling over who will be the king of YouTube. In October, PewDiePie even released a diss track about T-Series, which has been viewed more than 47 million times.

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Early Friday morning, the hotel behemoth Marriott announced a massive hack that impacts as many as 500 million customers who made a reservation at a Starwood hotel. Marriott acquired the Starwood hospitality group in September 2016, which operates numerous hotel brands including Sheraton, Westin, Aloft, and W Hotels. But the intrusion that caused the enormous data breach predates Marriott's acquisition, beginning in 2014.

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Tension has existed for decades between law enforcement and privacy advocates over data encryption. The United States government has consistently lobbied for the creation of so-called backdoors in encryption schemes that would give law enforcement a way in to otherwise unreadable data. Meanwhile, cryptographers have universally decried the notion as unworkable. But at a cybercrime symposium at the Georgetown University Law School on Thursday, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein renewed the call.

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Just a little over two hours separated President Trump angrily tweeting, “Did you ever see an investigation more in search of a crime?” and special counsel Robert Mueller announcing his latest evidence of new crimes Thursday morning. Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty for lying to Congress about the status of the real estate developer’s hotel deal in Moscow.

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The port of San Diego. The city of Atlanta. Kansas Heart Hospital. Those are just a few of the more than 200 municipalities, universities, hospitals, and other targets that have fallen victim to SamSam, a pernicious strain of ransomware that has spent the past three years rampaging throughout the US. On Wednesday, the Justice Department indicted two Iranian men allegedly behind the attacks.

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In recent years, hacks against the power grid have gone from a mostly theoretical risk to a real-world problem. Two large-scale blackouts in Ukraine caused by Russian cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016 showed just how feasible it is. But grid hacking comes in less dramatic forms as well—which makes Russia's continued probing of US critical infrastructure all the more alarming.

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