Security, Spoken

In offices and universities all across the country Thursday, the same threat appeared in email inboxes: Pay $20,000 worth of bitcoin, or a bomb will detonate in your building. Police departments sent out alerts. Workers from Los Angeles to Raleigh, North Carolina, evacuated their cubicles in the middle of the day. All over Twitter, people posted screenshots of the emails, many different versions of which appear to have been blasted out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This has not been Facebook's proudest year for privacy and security. The company faced the massive Cambridge Analytica data misuse and abuse scandal in April and beyond. It also disclosed its first data breach in October, which compromised information from 30 million accounts. But Facebook has at least one security-focused bright spot it can point to in 2018: its bug bounty. Bug bounties are programs that let security researchers submit potential flaws and vulnerabilities in a company's software. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The massive data breach that affected 500 million Marriott customers feels like a recent event, given that the company just discovered and disclosed it over the last four months. But it's important to remember that the attack began much earlier, especially as Reuters and others have reported that state-sponsored Chinese hackers were behind it. If that attribution holds up, China's broader hacking campaign against the US in 2014 will go down as a historic assault. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We are deep into the worst case scenarios. But as new sentencing memos for Trump associates Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen make all too clear, the only remaining question is how bad does the actual worst case scenario get? The potential innocent explanations for Donald Trump’s behavior over the last two years have been steadily stripped away, piece by piece. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In October, Google dramatically announced that it would shut down Google+ in August 2019, because the company had discovered through an internal audit (and a simultaneous Wall Street Journal exposé) that a bug in Google+ had exposed 500,000 users' data for about three years. Maybe it should have pulled the plug sooner. On Monday, Google announced that an additional bug in a Google+ API, part of a November 7 software update, exposed user data from 52.5 million accounts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This podcast covers cybersecurity incidents including the Quora data breach, Moscow's ransomware attack, China's suspected involvement in the Marriott hack, and mysterious cyber heists in Eastern European banks.

Experts discuss Australia's new encryption law, which forces tech companies to create backdoors in secure messaging platforms. The legislation raises concerns about privacy and security implications globally, impacting users of services like WhatsApp and iMessage.

I first came across the imposter Facebook page by accident. The page was made to look like that of my employer, Vietnam Veterans of America, complete with our organization's registered trademark and name. As an Iraq veteran and the office’s designated millennial policy guy, I was helping run VVA's social media accounts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the founder and director of a nonprofit animal shelter on the East Coast, Alana has spent most of the past decade caring for pets that might otherwise be euthanized. Her work also resonates with people online—the Facebook page for the shelter has more than 1.3 million followers. But in August, she noticed something strange: A series of unfamiliar posts began appearing on the page, and no one at the shelter could say where they were coming from. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Though sporadic hacker intrusions and phishing campaigns targeted political entities in the lead-up to November's midterm elections, things seemed pretty quiet overall on the election-meddling front in the US. Certainly no leaks or theatrics rose to the level of Russia's actions during the 2016 presidential election. But a belatedly revealed breach of the National Republican Congressional Committee shows just how bad the attack on the 2018 election really was. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices