Security, Spoken

The three college-age defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet—an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks—will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI.

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WIRED ICON Edward Snowden, NSA whistle-blower NOMINATES Malkia Cyril, Founder of the Center for Media Justice, cofounder of Media Action Grassroots Network October 2018. Subscribe to WIRED.Plunkett + Kuhr DesignersPeople generally associate the word radical with extreme. But I prefer to think of the word in reference to its Latin origin:radix, the root of the issue. My friend Malkia Cyril is a radical in the truest sense of the word.

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Facebook was a relatively early proponent of so-called bug bounties, paying out more than $6 million to security researchers who have spotted vulnerabilities in its platform since its program launched in 2011. But as the social network has faced a series of high profile and impactful controversies, its bug bounty increasingly doubles as an opportunity for Facebook to demonstrate maturation. That trend continues Monday, with the company's latest expansion.

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If you want to secure the data on your computer, one of the most important steps you can take is encrypting its hard drive. That way, if your laptop gets lost or stolen—or someone can get to it when you're not around—everything remains protected and inaccessible. But researchers at the security firm F-Secure have uncovered an attack that uses a decade-old technique, which defenders thought they had stymied, to expose those encryption keys, allowing a hacker to decrypt your data.

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The arc of innovation has reached aninflectionpoint: technological change now threatens to overwhelm us. Discovery is unstoppable, but it must be shaped for good. We ourselves—not just market forces—must manage it. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Ash Carter, former US Secretary of Defense, is the Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and its project on Technology and Public Purpose. He is also an Innovation Fellow at MIT.

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On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would automatically impose sanctions against any person or group attempting to interfere in United States elections. "The proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity of the threat of foreign interference [to elections]," Trump writes in the order. "I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with this threat.

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On Tuesday, Arizona's governor appointed former Republican senator Jon Kyl to fill the US Senate seat vacated by the late John McCain. The appointment could spell even more government scrutiny for tech giants like Facebook and Google—even though Kyl has only committed to serving until the start of the next Congressional session in January, though he may stay through 2020.

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On Friday, British Airways disclosed a data breach impacting customer information from roughly 380,000 booking transactions made between August 21 and September 5 of this year. The company said that names, addresses, email addresses, and sensitive payment card details were all compromised. Now, researchers from the threat detection firm RiskIQ have shed new light on how the attackers pulled off the heist.

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Apple prides itself on prioritizing user security and privacy. It counts the iOS and Mac App Stores, where customers can download an array of trusted, vetted software, as cornerstones of that initiative. But while the approach does minimize situations where users get tricked into downloading something nasty on the open web, malware inevitably slips through. In this case, that appears to include one of the most popular offerings in the Mac App Store.

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It's an unfortunate fact that the pricey pocket computers we carry around with us at all times are prime targets for thieves—as well as very easy to leave behind in subway cars or on coffee shop tables. Now that we all rely on our smartphones for so much, having one stolen or misplaced can feel like the end of the world. But it doesn't have to be, not quite. Here are the preparations you can take before the worst happens, and what to do if it does.

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