For years the government has kept mum about its use of a powerful phone surveillance technology known as a stingray. The Justice Department and local law enforcement agencies insist that the only reason for their secrecy is to prevent suspects from learning how the devices work and devising methods to thwart them. But a court […]
The post Feds Admit Stingrays Can Disrupt Cell Service of Bystanders appeared first on WIRED.
An Israeli man arrested last month for allegedly hacking Madonna’s private accounts and stealing demos of her unreleased album first began targeting the singer way back in 2012, according to authorities. He apparently hacked not only cloud storage accounts to steal and sell her music but also breached more than a dozen email accounts associated […]
The post Aspiring Israeli Singer Indicted for Hacking Madonna Since 2012 appeared first on WIRED.
As the the company confirmed the hacks, it downplayed their significance, insisting that the attackers failed to get inside the network where cryptographic keys are stored to protect mobile communications.
The post Gemalto Confirms It Was Hacked But Insists the NSA Didn’t Get Its Crypto Keys appeared first on WIRED.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden didn’t mince words during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Monday when he said the NSA and the British spy agency GCHQ had “screwed all of us” when it hacked into the Dutch firm Gemalto to steal cryptographic keys used in billions of mobile SIM cards worldwide. “When the NSA […]
The post Snowden: Spy Agencies ‘Screwed All of Us’ in Hacking Crypto Keys appeared first on WIRED.
Open Whisper Systems If you own an iPhone or Android handset and care about your privacy, there’s no longer much of an excuse not to encrypt every conversation you have. Now a free, zero-learning-curve app exists for both text and voice that can keep those communications fully encrypted, so that no one but the person […]
The post Why Firmware Is So Vulnerable to Hacking, and What Can Be Done About It appeared first on WIRED.
One of the most shocking parts of the recently discovered spying network Equation Group is its mysterious module designed to reprogram or reflash a computer hard drive’s firmware with malicious code. The Kaspersky researchers who uncovered this said its ability to subvert hard drive firmware—the guts of any computer—“surpasses anything else” they had ever seen. […]
The post How the NSA’s Firmware Hacking Works and Why It’s So Unsettling appeared first on WIRED.
CANCUN, Mexico—The last two years have been filled with revelations about NSA surveillance activities and the sophisticated spy tools the agency uses to take control of everything from individual systems to entire networks. Now it looks like researchers at Kaspersky Lab may have uncovered some of these NSA tools in the wild on customer machines, […]
The post Suite of Sophisticated Nation-State Attack Tools Found With Connection to Stuxnet appeared first on WIRED.
President Barack Obama announced a new Executive Order today aimed at facilitating the sharing of information about cyber-threats between private sector companies and the government. Speaking at a cybersecurity summit convened by the White House at Stanford University, Obama signed the order on stage to promote information sharing both within the private sector and between […]
The post Obama’s New Order Urges Companies to Share Cyber-Threat Info With the Government appeared first on WIRED.
In North America, the Canadians have long had to play country mouse to the flashier city mouse of the U.S. It’s the latter that gets all the attention, while the former sits quietly in a corner. But recent stories have shown just how big a player the Canadians are becoming—at least in the surveillance realm.
The post Canada Joins World Powers in Spying on Smartphone and Download Data appeared first on WIRED.
The specific hackers behind the Sony breach and data leaks may never be identified or arrested. But authorities say they have caught a hacker behind another high-profile breach: the intrusion into computers owned by Madonna, which resulted in leaks of her songs before their scheduled release. The Israeli suspect, 39-year-old Adi Lederman, was arrested in […]
The post Aspiring Singer Arrested in Israel on Suspicion of Hacking Madonna appeared first on WIRED.
Barrett Brown, who became a cause célèbre after he was charged with crimes related to the 2011 Stratfor hack, will not go free as his supporters hoped. He was sentenced today in Texas to five years and three months in prison.
The post Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison in Connection to Stratfor Hack appeared first on WIRED.
A Bitcoin exchange operator who pled guilty to supplying $1 million in digital currency to people buying drugs on Silk Road was sentenced to four years in prison Tuesday. Robert Faiella, who used the name BTCking online, had been arrested last year and charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and operating an unlicensed money […]
The post Bitcoin Exchange Operator Sentenced to 4 Years for Silk Road Transactions appeared first on WIRED.
TL;DR: Breach Notification refers to the notification that businesses, government agencies and other entities are required by law in most states to do when certain personally identifiable information is obtained, or believed to have been obtained by an unauthorized party. Breach Notification refers to the notification that businesses, government agencies and other entities are required […]
The post Hacker Lexicon: What Is a Breach Notification? appeared first on WIRED.
Twitter and YouTube accounts belonging to the military’s US Central Command were hacked on Monday. Hackers supportive of the terrorist group Islamic State, also known as ISIS, took credit and issued a warning to the U.S. military.
The post Central Command’s Twitter Account Hacked…As Obama Speaks on Cybersecurity appeared first on WIRED.
If the FBI’s revelations on Wednesday about the sloppiness of North Korea’s hackers was meant to silence critics who doubt the government’s attribution for what happened to Sony, it failed. Despite assertions from FBI Director James Comey that he has very high confidence in the attribution to North Korea and a statement by Director of […]
The post Critics Say New Evidence Linking North Korea to the Sony Hack Is Still Flimsy appeared first on WIRED.
The attack marks only the second confirmed incident in which a wholly digital hack created physical destruction of equipment.
The post A Cyberattack Has Caused Confirmed Physical Damage for the Second Time Ever appeared first on WIRED.
We examine the evidence for an against North Korea as the nation-state cyber attacker in the Sony case, and explore whether it’s likely the U.S. was behind cutting off its internet.
The post Experts Are Still Divided on Whether North Korea Is Behind Sony Attack appeared first on WIRED.
With each passing year, data breaches get bigger and more invasive. But 2014 saw a new twist to the breach phenomenon with the Sony hack. The attackers didn’t just steal data, they scorched Sony’s digital earth as they exited its networks, wiping data from servers and leaving administrators to clean up the mess and restore systems.
The post The Year’s Worst Hacks, From Sony to Celebrity Nude Pics appeared first on WIRED.
A week into the Sony hack, however, there is a lot of rampant speculation but few solid facts. Here’s a look at what we do and don’t know about what’s turning out to be the biggest hack of the year.
The post Sony Got Hacked Hard: What We Know and Don’t Know So Far appeared first on WIRED.
Piecing together new information from various researchers, it’s clear the ‘Regin” malware is one of the most sophisticated nation-state spy tools ever found.
The post Researchers Uncover Government Spy Tool Used to Hack Telecoms and Belgian Cryptographer appeared first on WIRED.
