Rite Aid Used Facial Recognition in Stores for Nearly a Decade

A SubStack email mess, a Nintendo leak, and more of the week's top security news...

Children Stream on Twitch—Where Potential Predators Find Them

A WIRED investigation found dozens of channels belong to children apparently under 13 and anonymous chat participants sending inappropriate messages their way...

Julian Assange Faces New Conspiracy Allegations

Plus: Evil Corp hacking, an anti-encryption bill, and more of the week's top security news...

What Is a Side Channel Attack?

Computers constantly give off more information than you might realize—which hackers can use to pry out their secrets...

How Apple and Google's Social Distancing Maps Work

New tools from the tech giants shows the dramatic impact of sheltering in place, using location data from phones like yours...

Clever Cryptography Could Protect Privacy in Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

Researchers are racing to achieve the benefits of location-tracking without the surveillance...

A Twitch Streamer Is Exposing Coronavirus Scams Live

Kitboga has built a following by trolling telemarketers. Covid-19 opportunists have given him a whole new crop of targets...

Security Experts Unite Over the Right to Repair

Securepairs.org is pushing back against a tech industry that wants independent repair legislation to be scary...

How the US Halted China’s Cybertheft—Using a Chinese Spy

For years, China has systematically looted American trade secrets. Here's the messy inside story of how DC got Beijing to clean up its act for a while...

Don't Buy the Trump Administration's China Misdirection

The White House keeps accusing China of election interference—but it's nothing like Russia in 2016...

Fake Beto O'Rourke Texts Expose New Playground for Trolls

Someone hijacked a volunteer tool to make it look like Beto O'Rourke encouraged voter fraud—and that could just be the beginning...

DoJ Charges North Korean Hacker for Sony, WannaCry, and More

The Department of Justice has taken its first legal action against North Korea's cybercrimes, in a massive complaint made public Thursday...

An Obscure App Flaw Creates Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones

Researchers at the University of Michigan expose how an obscure feature of thousands of apps can give hackers remote access into your phone's most sensitive guts. The post An Obscure App Flaw Creates Backdoors In Millions of Smartphones appeared first on WIRED...

Securing Driverless Cars From Hackers Is Hard. Ask the Ex-Uber Guy Who Protects Them

In his Uber exit interview, top car hacker Charlie Miller warns of the dangers of insecure autonomous vehicles. The post Securing Driverless Cars From Hackers Is Hard. Ask the Ex-Uber Guy Who Protects Them appeared first on WIRED...

Here’s the Truth About Whether Meta’s NameTag Face Recognition Tech ‘Exists’

Since WIRED reported on Meta’s NameTag face recognition system, company executives have made confusing and conflicting remarks about its very existence...

Dialog Claims It Was Hacked. A Misconfigured Website Left Its Members Exposed

The private events group, cofounded by Peter Thiel, says a “criminal” hacker is behind a breach that exposed members’ personal details. WIRED found no evidence a break-in was needed to access the files...

CISA Tells US Agencies to Fix Security Bugs in as Little as 3 Days Thanks to AI Threats

“Defenders cannot afford to take weeks to patch,” one Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official warned on Wednesday...

Trump Risks Key Surveillance Authority Over ‘Unqualified’ Spy-Chief Pick

US lawmakers are alarmed that Bill Pulte, a housing official with no intelligence experience, is poised to take charge of one of the government's most powerful surveillance tools...

Scammers Are Using Your Real Hotel Reservations to Trick You With Spear-Phishing Attacks

Customer data from more than 350 hotels around the world may have been accessed as part of realistic reservation-hijacking scams...

Meta Ramps Up Efforts to Disrupt Industrialized Scamming

Meta removed 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts linked to “criminal scam centers” last year, the company announced on Wednesday...

How Each Gulf Country Is Intercepting Iranian Missiles and Drones

As missiles and drones cross the region’s skies, the Gulf’s layered air-defense networks—from THAAD to Patriot batteries—are being tested in real time...

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are

ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules...

Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan

Rob Leathern and Rob Goldman, who both worked at Meta, are launching a new nonprofit that aims to bring transparency to an increasingly opaque, scam-filled social media ecosystem...

How Hacked Card Shufflers Allegedly Enabled a Mob-Fueled Poker Scam That Rocked the NBA

WIRED recently demonstrated how to cheat at poker by hacking the Deckmate 2 card shufflers used in casinos. The mob was allegedly using the same trick to fleece victims for millions...

Feds Seize Record-Breaking $15 Billion in Bitcoin From Alleged Scam Empire

Officials in the US and UK have taken sweeping action against “one of the largest investment fraud operations in history,” confiscating a historic amount of funds in the process...

How Waymo Handles Footage From Events Like the LA Immigration Protests

Waymo driverless taxis capture troves of video footage in order to operate, but the company reveals very little about how much data is stored—and for how long...

A Swedish MMA Tournament Spotlights the Trump Administration's Handling of Far-Right Terrorism

A member of a California-based fight club seems to have attended an event hosted by groups with ties to an organization the US government labeled a terrorist group. Will the Trump administration care?...

Coinbase Will Reimburse Customers Up to $400 Million After Data Breach

Plus: 12 more people are indicted over a $263 million crypto heist, and a former FBI director is accused of threatening Donald Trump thanks to an Instagram post of seashells...

WhatsApp Is Walking a Tightrope Between AI Features and Privacy

WhatsApp's AI tools will use a new “Private Processing” system designed to allow cloud access without letting Meta or anyone else see end-to-end encrypted chats. But experts still see risks...

Millions of Apple Airplay-Enabled Devices Can Be Hacked via Wi-Fi

Researchers reveal a collection of bugs known as AirBorne that would allow any hacker on the same Wi-Fi network as a third-party AirPlay-enabled device to surreptitiously run their own code on it...

What Really Happened With the DDoS Attacks That Took Down X

Elon Musk said a “massive cyberattack” disrupted X on Monday and pointed to “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area” as the source of the attack. Security experts say that's not how it works...

Pentagon Cuts Threaten Programs That Secure Loose Nukes and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Documents obtained by WIRED show the US Department of Defense is considering cutting up to 75 percent of workers who stop the spread of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons...

Under Trump, US Cyberdefense Loses Its Head

Chinese hacks, rampant ransomware, and Donald Trump’s budget cuts all threaten US security. In an exit interview with WIRED, former CISA head Jen Easterly argues for her agency’s survival...

Bitfinex Hacker Gets 5 Years for $10 Billion Bitcoin Heist

Plus: An “AI granny” is wasting scammers’ time, a lawsuit goes after spyware-maker NSO Group’s executives, and North Korea–linked hackers take a crack at macOS malware...

Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent

After eight months, one of the US’s most prominent crypto-crime investigators may finally be coming home...

Inside Ukraine’s Killer-Drone Startup Industry

Ukraine needs small drones to combat Russian forces—and is bootstrapping its own industry at home...

US Senate to Vote on a Wiretap Bill That Critics Call ‘Stasi-Like’

A controversial bill reauthorizing the Section 702 spy program may force whole new categories of businesses to eavesdrop on the US government’s behalf, including on fellow Americans...

The Privacy Danger Lurking in Push Notifications

Plus: Apple warns about sideloading apps, a court orders NSO group to turn over the code of its Pegasus spyware, and an investigation finds widely available security cams are wildly insecure...

A Flaw in Millions of Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm GPUs Could Expose AI Data

Patching every device affected by the LeftoverLocals vulnerability—which includes some iPhones, iPads, and Macs—may prove difficult...

The Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2023

From Sam Altman and Elon Musk to ransomware gangs and state-backed hackers, these are the individuals and groups that spent this year disrupting the world we know it...

US Lawmakers Want to Use a Powerful Spy Tool on Immigrants and Their Families

Legislation set to be introduced in Congress this week would extend Section 702 surveillance of people applying for green cards, asylum, and some visas—subjecting loved ones to similar intrusions...

US Privacy Groups Urge Senate Not to Ram Through NSA Spying Powers

An effort to reauthorize a controversial US surveillance program by attaching it to a must-pass spending bill has civil liberties advocates calling foul...

The NSA Seems Pretty Stressed About the Threat of Chinese Hackers in US Critical Infrastructure

US government officials continue to warn that the public and private sectors need to identify and root out China-backed attackers lurking in industrial control systems...

The AI-Generated Child Abuse Nightmare Is Here

Thousands of child abuse images are being created with AI. New images of old victims are appearing, as criminals trade datasets...

Who’s Responsible for the Gaza Hospital Explosion? Here’s Why It’s Hard to Know What’s Real

A flood of false information, partisan narratives, and weaponized “fact-checking" has obscured efforts to find out who’s responsible for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza...

The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation

People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen...

The Senate’s AI Future Is Haunted by the Ghost of Privacy Past

The US Congress is trying to tame the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. But senators’ failure to tackle privacy reform is making the task a nightmare...

Talitrix Prison-Monitoring System Tracks Inmates Down to Their Heart Rate

Documents WIRED obtained detail new prison-monitoring technology that keeps tabs on inmates' location, heartbeats, and more...

SafeGraph Lands US Air Force Contract After Targeting Abortion Clinics

Documents obtained by WIRED show SafeGraph, which sold location data related to Planned Parenthood visits, is now pursuing contracts with the US Air Force...

Google Is Rolling Out Passkeys, the Password-Killing Tech, to All Accounts

The tech industry’s transition to passkeys gets its first massive boost with the launch of the alternative login scheme for Google’s billions of users...