Tech

How law enforcement gets around your smartphone’s encryption

Enlarge / Uberwachung, Symbolbild, Datensicherheit, Datenhoheit (credit: Westend61 | Getty Images) Lawmakers and law enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have increasingly called for backdoors in the encryption schemes that protect your data, arguing that national security is at stake. But new research indicates governments already have methods and tools that, […]

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The NSA warns enterprises to beware of third-party DNS resolvers

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) DNS over HTTPS is a new protocol that protects domain-lookup traffic from eavesdropping and manipulation by malicious parties. Rather than an end-user device communicating with a DNS server over a plaintext channel—as DNS has done for more than three decades—DoH, as DNS over HTTPS is known, encrypts requests and responses using […]

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Hackers used 4 zero-days to infect Windows and Android devices

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Google researchers have detailed a sophisticated hacking operation that exploited vulnerabilities in Chrome and Windows to install malware on Android and Windows devices. Some of the exploits were zero-days, meaning they targeted vulnerabilities that at the time were unknown to Google, Microsoft, and most outside researchers (both companies have since patched […]

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AT&T kills off the failed TV service formerly known as DirecTV Now

Enlarge / AT&T corporate offices on November 10, 2020, in El Segundo, California. (credit: Getty Images | AaronP/Bauer-Griffin) AT&T is killing off the online-video service formerly known as DirecTV Now and introducing a no-contract option for the newer online service that replaced it. AT&T unveiled DirecTV Now late in 2016, the year after AT&T bought […]

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Hackers steal Mimecast certificate used to encrypt customers’ M365 traffic

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Email management provider Mimecast said that hackers have compromised a digital certificate it issued and used it to target select customers who use it to encrypt data they sent and received through the company’s cloud-based service. In a post published on Tuesday, the company said that the certificate was used by […]

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Parler’s amateur coding could come back to haunt Capitol Hill rioters

Enlarge / Parler? (credit: Getty Images) By now, you may have heard of the hacker who says she scraped 99 percent of posts from Parler, the Twitter-wannabe site used by Trump supporters to help organize last Wednesday’s violent insurrection on Capitol Hill. What you may not know yet is the abysmal coding and security that […]

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Jared Mauch didn’t have good broadband—so he built his own fiber ISP

Jared Mauch installed about five miles’ worth of this fiber cable. [credit: Jared Mauch ] The old saying “if you want something done right, do it yourself” usually isn’t helpful when your problem is not having good Internet service. But for one man in rural Michigan named Jared Mauch, who happens to be a network […]

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SolarWinds malware has “curious” ties to Russian-speaking hackers

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) The malware used to hack Microsoft, security company FireEye, and at least a half-dozen federal agencies has “interesting similarities” to malicious software that has been circulating since at least 2015, researchers said on Monday. Sunburst is the name security researchers have given to malware that infected about 18,000 organizations when they […]

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New York City proposes regulating algorithms used in hiring

Enlarge (credit: John Lamb | Getty Images) In 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred the humans who made hiring decisions from discriminating on the basis of sex or race. Now, software often contributes to those hiring decisions, helping managers screen résumés or interpret video interviews. That worries some tech experts and civil rights groups, who […]

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Reddit’s largest remaining Trump community banned for “inciting violence”

Enlarge / The image currently at the top of r/donaldtrump. (credit: Reddit) On Friday, Reddit joined this week’s response to violent online rhetoric as spearheaded by President Donald Trump and removed its “r/donaldtrump” community, the site’s largest existing community dedicated specifically to Trump. Visiting any of that community’s pages now leads to a simple message […]