Security, Spoken

There's no better way to protect yourself from the universal scourge of phishing attacks than with a hardware token like a Yubikey, which stymies attackers even if you accidentally hand them your username and password. But while Yubikey manufacturer Yubico describes its product as "unphishable," a pair of researchers has proven the company wrong, with a technique that allows clever phishers to sidestep even Yubico's last bastion of login protection.

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On Wednesday, at about 12:15pm ET, 1.35 terabits per second of traffic hit the developer platform GitHub all at once. It was the most powerful distributed denial of service attack recorded to date—and it used an increasingly popular DDoS method, no botnet required. GitHub briefly struggled with intermittent outages as a digital system assessed the situation. Within 10 minutes it had automatically called for help from its DDoS mitigation service, Akamai Prolexic.

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Five years ago, US law enforcement served Microsoft a search warrant for emails as part of a US drug trafficking investigation. In response, Microsoft handed over data stored on American servers, like the person’s address book. But it didn’t give the government the actual content of the individual’s emails, because they were stored at a Microsoft data center in Dublin, Ireland, where the subject said he lived when he signed up for his Outlook account.

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Three weeks ago, House Republicans publicly released a much-hyped memo written by representative Devin Nunes of California. It alleged, through a series of allusions, tangential facts, and seeming misdirections, that law enforcement officials had abused their power in obtaining a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. Now, in a 10-page memo of their own, House Democrats are attempting to set the record straight.

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When an Oregon science fiction writer named Charity tried to log onto Facebook on February 11, she found herself completely locked out of her account. A message appeared saying she needed to download Facebook’s malware scanner if she wanted to get back in. Charity couldn’t use Facebook until she completed the scan, but the file the company provided was for a Windows device—Charity uses a Mac.

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Today’s guilty plea by Rick Gates might be one of the least surprising developments in the Mueller investigation: It had been clear that the former Trump campaign aide would likely seek a deal almost since the day Gates and his business partner and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort were indicted in October, and we’ve seen reports for weeks that negotiations between Mueller and Gates have been underway.

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Robert Mueller's indictment of Russia's Internet Research Agency—also known as the "troll factory"—feels like years ago at this point. It's only been a week! And we took a deep dive into what it really says about Russia's propaganda efforts during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond. Trump campaign advisor Rick Gates has also copped a plea deal with Mueller's team—which could have big implications for the investigation going forward.

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v. Swiping computer processing power through a web browser to illicitly mint cryptocurrency. People who streamed the TV drama Billions last fall may have been hit by some real-life financial chica­nery. While they watched, a rogue script on the Showtime website directed their PCs to engage in “mining” operations for a bitcoin-like digital currency. Doing currency mining on your own machine is perfectly legit.

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It's almost Tax Day, which also means it's peak tax fraud season. The Internal Revenue Service has played some epic games of cat-and-mouse with phone and online scammers over the past 10 years, but the latest scamming trend for 2018 has a particularly devious twist. Here's how it works: Attackers use a taxpayer's stolen identity information to fraudulently file their returns for a refund. They allow that refund to direct deposit into the victim's actual bank account. Then the real fun starts.

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