Security, Spoken

A hacker group called Turkish Crime Family says that it can access 250 million iCloud accounts, and will do so on April 7 to reset the password, locking people out of their accounts. They’ve even threatened to wipe people’s linked iPhones if Apple doesn’t pay up. And while it’s hard to tell how legitimate the threat is, their assertions make now as good a time to lock down your iCloud as ever.

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As so many of them have been lately, it was a wild week in security. Monday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed that an ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia began last July. The GOP responded minutes later by charging hard against-leaks. That really set the tone! House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes added some misplaced intrigue by suggesting Trump or his associates had been caught up in surveillance, which isn't what it sounds like.

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Because you care greatly about your personal security hygiene, you’ve already enlisted two-factor authentication to help protect most of your online accounts. That’s good! Instagram, though, hasn’t given you the option. That changes today. Go get it. While Instagram had made two-factor available to a select group of users previously, the extra layer of protection is now available to all, meaning you, meaning it’s time to fiddle with some settings.

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First, the good news: Half of all Android devices have gotten fairly recent security updates, patching the hackable flaws that leave users vulnerable to digital crime and espionage. The bad news? The other half hasn’t. In an annual report on the security of the world’s 1.4 billion Android devices that Google released today, the company touts the ever-improving state of Android security.

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Barack Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower ahead of the presidentialelection. The definitive word on this came today from two people who would know: Richard Burr and Mark Warner, who leadthe Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Of course,President Donald Trump refuses to believe this, even though it is the best news he could hope for.

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Nothing much of interest happened in the world of cybersecurity this week. Kidding! But wouldn't that be nice? If we were living in a simpler time when innocent victims weren't hit by a new, weird hack every day, and international cyberespionage wasn't undermining everything from governments to businesses to Twitter accounts? You could just argue about who won The Bachelor and move on with your life. Unfortunately, this is 2017, so naturally this week's hacks were actually completely ridiculous.

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You know not to click on links in sketchy emails. Everybody knows that. And yet, people fall for these phishing attacks all the time. Case in point: The FBI suspects a phishing email is how the Russian hackers who were indicted this week got into Yahoo. Ditto for the breach of the Democratic National Committee, and the Sony Pictures hack. In fact, there’s currently a Gmail phishing scam going around that even super savvy techies are falling for.

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Last night, a swath of Twitter accounts with large followings—including Duke University, BBC North America, Forbes, and Amnesty International—tweeted out the same message, in Turkish, that included a swastika and hashtags that translate to “Nazi Germany, Nazi Holland.” The hacked accounts, which apparently stem from increasing vitriol between Turkey and Holland, appear to have all been restored.

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On February 26th, WIRED's security reporter Andy Greenberg received an email from Sophia Tupolev, the head of communications at the security firm Beame.io, saying she'd found a security issue on WIRED.com. Tupolev's company had discovered sensitive data in the source code on many pages on our site, including obfuscated, "hashed" passwords and email addresses for current and former WIRED writers. We corrected the problem right away.

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Amid so many recent high-profile hacks and data breaches, security experts are fond of pointing out that there’s no such thing as perfect security. It’s true! But it also invites the question: Why doesn’t literally everything get hacked all the time? The answer has to do with the relative incentives and the costs of infiltrating a given network. And one of the concepts underlying that calculus is the idea of an “attack surface.” Here’s an example.

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