Security, Spoken

This week, reports have percolated that Facebook is testing a new menu item, called "Protect," in its iOS app. The feature sports a blue shield icon, and tapping it redirects you to the App Store listing for Facebook-owned VPN app Onavo Protect. But while Onavo does claim to offer some tools that make the web safer, in practice it falls far short of the privacy protections that VPN users reasonably expect.

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Facial recognition and machine learning programs have officially been democratized, and of course the internet is using the tech to make porn. As first reported by Motherboard, people are now creating AI-assisted face-swap porn, often featuring a celebrity's face mapped onto a porn star's body, like Gal Gadot's likeness in a clip where she's supposedly sleeping with her stepbrother.

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The rise of cryptojacking—which co-opts your PC or mobile device to illicitly mine cryptocurrency when you visit an infected site—has fueled mining's increasing appeal. But as attackers have expanded their tools to slyly outsource the number of devices, processing power, and electricity powering their mining operations, they've moved beyond the browser in potentially dangerous ways.

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On Tuesday, the heads of the NSA, CIA, FBI, and ODNI—America's intelligence community brain trust—gathered before members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss various worldwide threats. And while most of the topics were familiar, the hearing also included a few revelatory moments, insights into fears that were either detailed or confirmed.

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Russian hackers, with hardly a shred of deniability, have targeted the Pyeongchang Olympics for months in retaliation for the country's doping ban, stealing and leaking documents from Olympics-related organizations. Now a more insidious attack has surfaced, one designed not to merely embarrass, but disrupt the opening ceremonies themselves.

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Over the last several years, a number of social media and dating platforms have begun emphasizing users’ real names. Facebook started requiring people sign up with their “authentic” names in 2014. Twitter invited anyone to apply to be “verified”—meaning Twitter certified they were who they claimed—in 2016. In December, OkCupid said it would no longer allow prospective daters to use names like “sexgirl_420.

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This week may have been, perhaps, the closest thing the cybersecurity world can experience to a lull in the digital mayhem. With the exception of one very significant Apple leak—and we'll get to that—hackers kept their breaches, disruptions, and scams close to the baseline. At least, that we know of. One of the most significant news stories of the week was, in fact, a massive law enforcement takedown.

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When Hurricane Harvey wreaked destruction in Houston last August, the country turned not just to cable television, but also to Snapchat. Two months before the storm, the social media app had debuted Snap Map, a crowdsourced, interactive feature that displays what’s happening on Snapchat around the world. At launch, Snap Map seemed mostly like a fun toy, albeit one with potential privacy implications; Snap Map can broadcast your location to your friends if you opt in.

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It's been roughly two years since the first signs that Russia had launched an interference campaign aimed at the 2016 presidential race, and now the United States is hurtling toward a set of pivotal midterm elections in November. But while some states have made an earnest effort to secure the vote, the overall landscape looks troubling—and in some cases, it's too late to fix it this year.

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You don't read privacy policies. And of course, that's because they're not actually written for you, or any of the other billions of people who click to agree to their inscrutable legalese. Instead, like bad poetry and teenagers' diaries, those millions upon millions of words are produced for the benefit of their authors, not readers—the lawyers who wrote those get-out clauses to protect their Silicon Valley employers.

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