AI Chatbots Are Invading Your Local Government—and Making Everyone Nervous

State and local governments in the US are scrambling to harness tools like ChatGPT to unburden their bureaucracies, rushing to write their own rules—and avoid generative AI's many pitfalls...

Mozilla: Your New Car Is a Data Privacy Nightmare

Plus: Apple patches newly discovered flaws exploited by NSO Group spyware, North Korean hackers target security researchers, and more...

Top US Spies Meet With Privacy Experts Over Surveillance 'Crown Jewel'

Civil rights groups say efforts to get US intelligence agencies to adopt privacy reforms have largely failed. Without those changes, renewal of a post-911 surveillance policy may be doomed...

Axon's Ethics Board Resigned Over Taser-Armed Drones. Then the Company Bought a Military Drone Maker

The CEO’s vision for Taser-equipped drones includes a fictitious scenario in which the technology averts a shooting at a day care center...

US and UK Mount Aggressive Crackdown on Trickbot and Conti Ransomware Gangs

Authorities have sanctioned 11 alleged members of the cybercriminal groups, while the US Justice Department unsealed three federal indictments against nine people accused of being members...

The International Criminal Court Will Now Prosecute Cyberwar Crimes

And the first case on the docket may well be Russia’s cyberattacks against civilian critical infrastructure in Ukraine...

Facebook Trains Its AI on Your Data. Opting Out May Be Futile

Here's how to request that your personal information not be used to train Meta's AI model. "Request" is the operative word here...

The Comedy of Errors That Let China-Backed Hackers Steal Microsoft’s Signing Key

After leaving many questions unanswered, Microsoft explains in a new postmortem the series of slipups that allowed attackers to steal and abuse a valuable cryptographic key...

How China Demands Tech Firms Reveal Hackable Flaws in Their Products

Some foreign companies may be complying—potentially offering China’s spies hints for hacking their customers...

Generative AI’s Biggest Security Flaw Is Not Easy to Fix

Chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection attacks. Security researchers say the holes can be plugged—sort of...

The Strange Afterlife of Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin

Posts praising the Wagner Group boss following his death in a mysterious plane crash last month indicate he was still in control of his "troll farm," researchers claim...

How to Remove Your Personal Info From Google by Using Its ‘Results About You’ Tool

You can now set up alerts for whenever your home address, phone number, and email address appears in Search...

How to Use Proton Sentinel to Keep Your Accounts Safe

If you want the highest possible level of protection, this is it...

2 Polish Men Arrested for Radio Hack That Disrupted Trains

Plus: A major FBI botnet takedown, new Sandworm malware, a cyberattack on two major scientific telescopes—and more...

Apple's Decision to Kill Its CSAM Photo-Scanning Tool Sparks Fresh Controversy

Child safety group Heat Initiative plans to launch a campaign pressing Apple on child sexual abuse material scanning and user reporting. The company issued a rare, detailed response on Thursday...

Google Fixes Serious Security Flaws in Chrome and Android

Plus: Mozilla patches more than a dozen vulnerabilities in Firefox, and enterprise companies Ivanti, Cisco, and SAP roll out a slew of updates to get rid of some high-severity bugs...

Unmasking Trickbot, One of the World’s Top Cybercrime Gangs

A WIRED investigation into a cache of documents posted by an unknown figure lays bare the Trickbot ransomware gang’s secrets, including the identity of a central member...

The Weird, Big-Money World of Cybercrime Writing Contests

The competitions, which are held on Russian-language cybercrime forums, offer prize money of up to $80,000 for the winners...

The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland's Railway System

The sabotage of more than 20 trains in Poland by apparent supporters of Russia was carried out with a simple “radio-stop” command anyone could broadcast with $30 in equipment...

The Low-Stakes Race to Crack an Encrypted German U-Boat Message

A ramshackle team of American scientists scrambled to decode the Nazi cipher before the time ran out. Luckily, they had a secret weapon...

This Tool Lets Hackers Dox Almost Anyone in the US

The US Secret Service’s relationship with the Oath Keepers gets revealed, Tornado Cash cofounders get indicted, and a UK court says a teen is behind a Lapsus$ hacking spree...

Donald Trump's Mug Shot Matters in a World of Fakes

The first booking photo of a US president stands out among a sea of photoshops and AI-generated images online...

Trump’s Prosecution Is America’s Last Hope

Social norms—not laws—are the underlying fabric of democracy. The Georgia indictment against Donald Trump is the last tool remaining to repair that which he’s torn apart...

The Last Hour Before Yevgeny Prigozhin's Plane Crash

Russia tightly controls its information space—making it hard to get accurate information out of the country. But open source data provides some clues about the crash...

Why The Chainsmokers Invest in—and Party With—Niche Cybersecurity Companies

Musician Alex Pall spoke with WIRED about his VC firm, the importance of raising cybersecurity awareness in a rapidly digitizing world, and his surprise that hackers know how to go hard...

How to Talk to Your Kids About Social Media and Mental Health

Here’s what the science really says about teens and screens—and how to start the conversation with young people of any age...

The Internet Is Turning Into a Data Black Box. An ‘Inspectability API’ Could Crack It Open

Unlike web browsers, mobile apps increasingly make it difficult or impossible to see what companies are really doing with your data. The answer? An inspectability API...

New Supply Chain Attack Hit Close to 100 Victims—and Clues Point to China

The hackers, who mostly targeted victims in Hong Kong, also hijacked Microsoft’s trust model to make their malware harder to detect...

The Most Popular Digital Abortion Clinics, Ranked by Data Privacy

Telehealth companies that provide abortion pills are surging in popularity. Which are as safe as they claim to be?...

Google's New Feature Ensures Your Pixel Phone Hasn't Been Hacked. Here’s How It Works

Pixel Binary Transparency is the latest security benefit for Pixel owners...

Security News This Week: US Energy Firm Targeted With Malicious QR Codes in Mass Phishing Attack

New research reveals the strategies hackers use to hide their malware distribution system, and companies are rushing to release mitigations for the “Downfall” processor vulnerability on Intel chips...

HHS Launches 'Digiheals' Project to Better Protect US Hospitals From Ransomware

An innovation agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services will fund research into better defenses for the US health care system’s digital infrastructure...

How X Is Suing Its Way Out of Accountability

The social media giant filed a lawsuit against a nonprofit that researches hate speech online. It’s the latest effort to cut off the data needed to expose online platforms’ failings...

A Huge Scam Targeting Kids With Roblox and Fortnite 'Offers' Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight

The wide-ranging scams, often disguised as game promotions, can all be linked back to one network...

An Apple Malware-Flagging Tool Is ‘Trivially’ Easy to Bypass

The macOS Background Task Manager tool is supposed to spot potentially malicious software on your machine. But a researcher says it has troubling flaws...

A New Attack Reveals Everything You Type With 95 Percent Accuracy

A pair of major data breaches rock the UK, North Korea hacks a Russian missile maker, and Microsoft’s Chinese Outlook breach sparks new problems...

GitHub’s Hardcore Plan to Roll Out Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

GitHub has spent two years researching and slowly rolling out its multifactor authentication system. Soon it will be mandatory for all 100 million users—with no opt-out...

Teens Hacked Boston Subway’s CharlieCard to Get Infinite Free Rides—and This Time Nobody Got Sued

In 2008, Boston’s transit authority sued to stop MIT hackers from presenting at the Defcon hacker conference on how to get free subway rides. Today, four teens picked up where they left off...

Leaked Yandex Code Breaks Open the Creepy Black Box of Online Advertising

As the international tech giant moves toward Russian ownership, the leak raises concerns about the volume of data it has on its users...

Panasonic Warns That IoT Malware Attack Cycles Are Accelerating

The legacy electronics manufacturer is creating IoT honeypots with its products to catch real-world threats and patch vulnerabilities in-house...

Hackers Rig Casino Card-Shuffling Machines for ‘Full Control’ Cheating

Security researchers accessed an internal camera inside the Deckmate 2 shuffler to learn the exact deck order—and the hand of every player at a poker table...

A Clever Honeypot Tricked Hackers Into Revealing Their Secrets

Security researchers set up a remote machine and recorded every move cybercriminals made—including their login details...

New ‘Downfall’ Flaw Exposes Valuable Data in Generations of Intel Chips

The vulnerability could allow attackers to take advantage of an information leak to steal sensitive details like private messages, passwords, and encryption keys...

What Doctors Wish You Knew About HIPAA and Data Security

Think US health data is automatically kept private? Think again...

The Mystery of Chernobyl’s Post-Invasion Radiation Spikes

Soon after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, sensors in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone reported radiation spikes. A researcher now believes he’s found evidence the data was manipulated...

Microsoft’s AI Red Team Has Already Made the Case for Itself

Since 2018, a dedicated team within Microsoft has attacked machine learning systems to make them safer. But with the public release of new generative AI tools, the field is already evolving...

Criminals Have Created Their Own ChatGPT Clones

Cybercriminals are touting large language models that could help them with phishing or creating malware. But the AI chatbots could just be their own kind of scam...

How to Automatically Delete Passcode Texts on Android and iOS

Here’s one simple way to reduce your security risk while logging in...

Security News This Week: The Cloud Company at the Center of a Global Hacking Spree

Plus: A framework for encrypting social media, Russia-backed hacking through Microsoft Teams, and the Bitfinex Crypto Couple pleads guilty...

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...