For years, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has been dogged by rumors of malfeasance and federal investigations. Today, in a set of accusations that will rock the already tumultuous world of crypto, the US Department of Justice revealed criminal charges against the company and its chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, …
Read More »Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality. According to the letter, a surveillance …
Read More »Inside the Race to Secure Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix
Every Formula 1 race weekend is essentially a pop-up event in a different city around the world, bringing 10 teams, their cars, and their entire mobile infrastructure to Australia, Singapore, Monaco, and beyond. This weekend's Las Vegas Grand Prix is especially unscripted, though, because the event is Formula 1's debut …
Read More »Cybersecurity Industry Baffled by FBI’s Lack of Action on Ransomware Gang
If you work at a spy agency tasked with surveilling the communications of more than 160 million people, it’s probably a good idea to make sure all the data in your possession stays off the open internet. Just ask Bangladesh’s National Telecommunication Monitoring Center, which security researchers found connected to …
Read More »How to Turn Off Facebook’s Two-Factor Authentication Change
Meta changed how two-factor authentication works for Facebook and Instagram last year. You might have received notifications about this, but it was easy to miss in the platform’s sea of red alerts. OK, so what’s different? “Any devices you’ve frequently used Facebook on in the past two years will be …
Read More »US Congress Report Calls for Privacy Reforms After FBI Surveillance 'Abuses'
A report compiled by the Republican majority members of the US House Intelligence Committee says that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation should be required under the law to obtain a “probable cause warrant” before scouring the database of a controversial foreign intelligence surveillance program for information related to …
Read More »A Spy Agency Leaked People's Data Online—Then the Data Was Stolen
The list of data is long. Names, professions, blood groups, parents’ names, phone numbers, the length of calls, vehicle registrations, passport details, fingerprint photos. But this isn’t a typical database leak, the kind that happens all the time—these categories of information are all linked to a database held by an …
Read More »Social Media Sleuths, Armed With AI, Are Identifying Dead Bodies
Content Warning: This story includes references to suicide. If you need help, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for your region. In 2021, an unidentified Black woman died by suicide after jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. She was wearing hot-pink nail polish, and had a pink left eyebrow piercing and …
Read More »Google’s New Titan Security Key Adds Another Piece to the Password-Killing Puzzle
Passwords are a woefully insecure—and frustrating—authentication technology, but after decades of digital use, they’re ubiquitous. Recently, though, the global tech industry has been working to promote a simpler and more secure alternative known as passkeys. Along with its other initiatives to champion the login tech, Google announced today that it …
Read More »Running Signal Will Soon Cost $50 Million a Year
The encrypted messaging and calling app Signal has become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the tech world: It has grown from the preferred encrypted messenger for the paranoid privacy elite into a legitimately mainstream service with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide. And it has done this entirely as a nonprofit …
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