Security, Spoken

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s contact and relationships with Russia. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a highly anticipated hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, lawmakers questioned Christopher Wylie, a former research director for the shadowy political data firm Cambridge Analytica, about the company's history of privacy violations, its contacts with Russia, and its work with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook announced this week that algorithms catch 99.5 percent of the terrorism-related content it deletes before a single user reports it. Thanks to steadily advancing AI tools, that's an improvement from last year, when that figure hovered around 97 percent. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most antivirus scanners play a classic cat and mouse game: They work by checking software against a frequently updated list of potential threats. In response, a whole industry has built up to help occlude and conceal hacking tools. That includes services that automate the process of checking all sorts of tools, from malware to malicious URLs, against dozens of defense scanners to see if they would get blocked. The feedback helps bad actors know what to tweak further, and whats ready to use. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With midterm elections looming and primaries already underway in many states, anxiety has been building over the possibility of cyberattacks that could impact voting. Though officials and election security researchers alike are adamant that voters can trust the United States election system, they also acknowledge shortcomings of the current security setup. Little time remains to meaningfully improve election security before the midterms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A little over a month ago, the White House forced out Tom Bossert, its cybersecurity czar. A week later, cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce said he would depart as well. And now, rather than replace either, the Trump administration will do without anyone at the helm of its cybersecurity policy. It couldn’t have picked a worse time. The news that the newly appointed national security adviser John Bolton has decided to phase out the cybersecurity coordinator role was first reported by Politico. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The ubiquitous email encryption schemes PGP and S/MIME are vulnerable to attack, according to a group of German and Belgian researchers who posted their findings on Monday. The weakness could allow a hacker to expose plaintext versions of encrypted messages—a nightmare scenario for users who rely on encrypted email to protect their privacy, security, and safety. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this week, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released roughly 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm. Among them: Ads purchased in May of 2016 that promoted a suspicious Chrome extension that gained wide access to the Facebook accounts and web browsing behavior of those who installed it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, the United States officially backed out of the Iran nuclear deal. The geopolitical reverberations should continue to play out in a variety of fields, but make sure you count cybersecurity among them. Iran targeted the US frequently—particularly financial institutions before the deal went into place. Security experts warn that with the agreement no longer in place, the barrage could begin again. So, look out for that! We also took a look at facial recognition technology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the last few years, police forces around China have invested heavily to build the world's largest video surveillance and facial recognition system, incorporating more than 170 million cameras so far. In a December test of the dragnet in Guiyang, a city of 4.3 million people in southwest China, a BBC reporter was flagged for arrest within seven minutes of police adding his headshot to a facial recognition database. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices