Security, Spoken

A massive effort to encrypt web traffic over the last few years has made green padlocks and "https" addresses increasingly common; more than half the web now uses internet encryption protocols to keep data protected from prying eyes as it travels back and forth between sites and browsers. But as with any sweeping reform, the progress also comes with some new opportunities for fraud. And phishers are loving HTTPS.

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A series of leaks has rocked the National Security Agency over the past few years, resulting in digital spy tools strewn across the web that have caused real damage both inside and outside the agency. Many of the breaches have been relatively simple to carry out, often by contractors like the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who employed just a USB drive and some chutzpah.

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It's been a rough week for a lot of people, but particularly for Apple. On Tuesday, a security researcher tweeted information about a dire bug in the company's macOS High Sierra operating system that allowed anyone being prompted for system user credentials to bypass the authentication by simply typing "root" as the username and leaving the password blank. Apple rushed to push out a necessary update on Wednesday, but botched it a bit; if you hadn't yet updated to macOS 10.13.

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When a company like Apple rushes out a software patch for a critical security bug, it deserves praise for protecting its customers quickly. Except, perhaps, when that patch is so rushed that it's nearly as buggy as the code it was designed to fix.

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Just 17 months after leading chants of “Lock her up” at the Republican National Convention, protesting FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn himself faced the inside of a Washington courtroom Friday morning.

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You may not realize it, but the cell phone in your pocket creates a time-stamped map of everywhere you go: where you shop, where you receive medical care, and how often you frequent a church, school, or gun range. That's because cell phones automatically connect to the nearest cell phone tower, and by doing so, constantly determine and record the user's location. WIRED OPINION ABOUT Andrew D.

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It's increasingly unremarkable for consumers to use artificial intelligence tools in their daily lives. Machine learning algorithms power your smart assistants, organize your vacation photos, and even analyze your health data. But human beings pick up the slack for those automated technologies more often than you might realize. And that means that real people can sometimes access user data that customers thought would only be seen by machines.

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The intersection of quantum computing and espionage may feel like a faraway future. But in his latest novel, David Ignatius, Washington’s own John le Carré, tackles just that. The Quantum Spy, out now, revolves around a central theme of spy literature: the race for a new technology, to discover something new that, even if only for a moment, will provide a geopolitical advantage.

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There are hackable security flaws in software. And then there are those that don't even require hacking at all—just a knock on the door, and asking to be let in. Apple's macOS High Sierra has the second kind. On Tuesday, security researchers disclosed a bug that allows anyone a blindingly easy method of breaking that operating system's security protections.

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