Security, Spoken

When the still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers spilled a collection of NSA tools onto the internet in a series of leaks starting in 2016, they offered a rare glimpse into the internal operations of the the world's most advanced and stealthy hackers. But those leaks haven't just let the outside world see into the NSA's secret capabilities. They might also let us see the rest of the world's hackers through the NSA's eyes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in United States v. Microsoft, a case that many observers believe could have significant ramifications for how cloud computing and other technology companies interact with the US government. If it were up to the justices themselves, however, those implications would end up being short-lived. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Uber faces more potential legal consequences for waiting to make public a major hack until a over a year after it happened. The Pennsylvania Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Uber Monday for violating the state's data breach notification law, which says hacks should be disclosed within a "reasonable" time frame. Uber didn't merely keep quiet about the massive breach; it reportedly paid a $100,000 ransom to the perpetrators in exchange for their silence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It was a wild west week in security, as GitHub succeeded in surviving the biggest DDoS attack ever (1.35 terabits per second!) and analysts scrutinized the "false flag" techniques Russian hackers have used in their attacks to shift blame and throw off investigators. Researchers found an unexpected method for executing phishing attacks against some "unphishable" Yubikey two-factor authentication tokens. (Not the one included in WIRED's subscription package. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For more than a year, Jonathan Albright has served as something of a one-man General Accounting Office for the tech industry. The researcher at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism has dug into the details on how political Twitter trolls manipulate the media, and unearthed an intricate web of conspiracy theory videos on YouTube. Last weekend, while digging through Facebook’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee from last fall, something else caught his eye. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Yes, websites track your behavior online. But some go much further than what you'd reasonably expect, using so-called session replays to create a detailed log of everything you do and type on a site. And new research shows that in some cases these movie-like recordings are even storing your passwords. Bulk data collection is always a privacy red flag. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Discover how even the most secure hardware tokens, like Yubikeys, are vulnerable to phishing attacks. Researchers unveil a technique exploiting a critical flaw in Google Chrome, allowing hackers to bypass robust protection. The conversation highlights the complexity of these attacks and the importance of staying vigilant in online security, especially for high-value targets. Prepare for eye-opening insights into the evolving landscape of cyber threats.

On Wednesday, at about 12:15pm ET, 1.35 terabits per second of traffic hit the developer platform GitHub all at once. It was the most powerful distributed denial of service attack recorded to date—and it used an increasingly popular DDoS method, no botnet required. GitHub briefly struggled with intermittent outages as a digital system assessed the situation. Within 10 minutes it had automatically called for help from its DDoS mitigation service, Akamai Prolexic. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Five years ago, US law enforcement served Microsoft a search warrant for emails as part of a US drug trafficking investigation. In response, Microsoft handed over data stored on American servers, like the person’s address book. But it didn’t give the government the actual content of the individual’s emails, because they were stored at a Microsoft data center in Dublin, Ireland, where the subject said he lived when he signed up for his Outlook account. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices