Security, Spoken

On Tuesday, a trifecta of tech companies announced that they had thwarted what appear to be significant cyberattacks from Russia and Iran. First, Microsoft CEO Brad Smith announced that the company had caught another round of phishing attacks on political groups in the United States, which it attributed to the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear. Then it was Facebook's turn.

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It was a perfect sunny summer afternoon in Copenhagen when the world’s largest shipping conglomerate began to lose its mind. The headquarters of A.P. Møller-Maersk sits beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Copenhagen’s harbor. A ship’s mast carrying the Danish flag is planted by the building’s northeastern corner, and six stories of blue-tinted windows look out over the water, facing a dock where the Danish royal family parks its yacht.

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Early Tuesday, Microsoft announced that last week it seized control of six domains owned by the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, also known as APT28. The hackers had used the sites to mount midterm election-related phishing campaigns, similar to those Fancy Bear launched during the 2016 United States election season. It's the most prominent, publicly known effort to proactively identify and thwart Russian election hacking efforts—and Microsoft's in a unique position to pull it off.

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In late July, a group of high-ranking Facebook executives organized an emergency conference call with reporters across the country. That morning, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained, they had shut down 32 fake pages and accounts that appeared to be coordinating disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

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In a move that has shocked career national security officials, President Trump stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance this week, and announced he was considering doing so for a host of others. The move so enraged retired Navy Admiral William McRaven—the man who oversaw the killing of Osama Bin Laden—that he wrote an op-ed telling Trump to revoke his clearance too, in solidarity with Brennan.

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A spate of hacked Instagram accounts. A $220 million lawsuit against AT&T. A bustling underground crime ring. They all have roots in an old problem that has lately found new urgency: SIM card swaps, a scam in which hackers steal your mobile identity—and use it to upend your life. At its most basic level, a SIM swap is when someone convinces your carrier to switch your phone number over to a SIM card they own. They’re not doing it for prank call cover, or to rack up long-distance charges.

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For the past week, psychologists all over America have been freaking out. The cause of their agita was an observation by a psychology graduate student from the University of Minnesota named Max Hui Bai. Like many researchers, Bai uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, where individuals sign up to complete simple tasks, such as taking surveys for academics or marketers, and earn a low fee.

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Imagine someone robs your house. The savvy culprit didn't leave behind fingerprints, shoe prints, or any other discrete, identifying details. Still, police manage to link the crime to a series of burglaries that happened the next town over, because of the criminal's behavior. Each robbery occurred in the same way, and in each case, the perpetrator stole many of the same items.

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Now in its second year, the Voting Machine Hacking Village at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas features a new set of voting machines—all of which will actually be used in the 2018 midterm elections—for attendees to analyze and attack. But as eager attendees get to work familiarizing themselves with the devices and revealing their weaknesses, another call has emerged from the Village as well: Finding bugs is great. But you also need the money to fix them.

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Two weeks ago, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed that the Android version of Fortnite, largely seen as the most popular game in the world, would not be available through the Google Play Store. Instead, fans would have to install it from the web. The announcement drew heaps of attention—not least of which came from peddlers of malware. Fortnite only became broadly available on Android this week.

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