Security, Spoken

Of all of the tech platforms that Russian trolls infiltrated during the run-up to the 2016 election in the United States, Reddit has been among the least forthcoming.

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In privacy-focused, anti-establishment corners of the internet, going open source can earn you a certain amount of street cred. It signals that you not only have nothing to hide, but also welcome the rest of the world to help make your project better. For Ghostery though, the company that makes Edward Snowden’s recommended ad blocker, publishing all its code on GitHub Thursday also means clearing up some confusion about its past.

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For anyone who has watched the last few years of cat-and-mouse games on the dark web's black markets, the pattern is familiar: A contraband bazaar like the Silk Road attracts thousands of drug dealers and their customers, along with intense scrutiny from police and three-letter agencies. Authorities hunt down its administrators, and tear the site offline in a dramatic takedown—only to find that its buyers and sellers have simply migrated to the next dark-web market on their list.

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An elite Russian hacking team, a historic ransomware attack, an espionage group in the Middle East, and countless small time cryptojackers all have one thing in common. Though their methods and objectives vary, they all lean on leaked NSA hacking tool EternalBlue to infiltrate target computers and spread malware across networks. Leaked to the public not quite a year ago, EternalBlue has joined a long line of reliable hacker favorites.

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When the still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers spilled a collection of NSA tools onto the internet in a series of leaks starting in 2016, they offered a rare glimpse into the internal operations of the the world's most advanced and stealthy hackers. But those leaks haven't just let the outside world see into the NSA's secret capabilities. They might also let us see the rest of the world's hackers through the NSA's eyes.

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in United States v. Microsoft, a case that many observers believe could have significant ramifications for how cloud computing and other technology companies interact with the US government. If it were up to the justices themselves, however, those implications would end up being short-lived.

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Uber faces more potential legal consequences for waiting to make public a major hack until a over a year after it happened. The Pennsylvania Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Uber Monday for violating the state's data breach notification law, which says hacks should be disclosed within a "reasonable" time frame. Uber didn't merely keep quiet about the massive breach; it reportedly paid a $100,000 ransom to the perpetrators in exchange for their silence.

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It was a wild west week in security, as GitHub succeeded in surviving the biggest DDoS attack ever (1.35 terabits per second!) and analysts scrutinized the "false flag" techniques Russian hackers have used in their attacks to shift blame and throw off investigators. Researchers found an unexpected method for executing phishing attacks against some "unphishable" Yubikey two-factor authentication tokens. (Not the one included in WIRED's subscription package.

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For more than a year, Jonathan Albright has served as something of a one-man General Accounting Office for the tech industry. The researcher at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism has dug into the details on how political Twitter trolls manipulate the media, and unearthed an intricate web of conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. Last weekend, while digging through Facebook’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee from last fall, something else caught his eye.

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Yes, websites track your behavior online. But some go much further than what you'd reasonably expect, using so-called session replays to create a detailed log of everything you do and type on a site. And new research shows that in some cases these movie-like recordings are even storing your passwords. Bulk data collection is always a privacy red flag.

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