Vietnamese government agents tried to plant spyware on the phones of members of Congress, American policy experts and U.S. journalists this year in a brazen campaign that underscores the rapid proliferation of state-of-the-art hacking tools, according to forensic examination of links posted to Twitter and documents uncovered by a consortium of news outlets that includes The Washington Post.
Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.
How a group of teen friends plunged into an underworld of cybercrime and broke the internet—then went to work for the FBI.
A great piece on the creators of the Mirai botnet and the law enforcement agents who hunted them.
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.See additional reporting from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
[T]here has been a growing perception that moonshots are the primary model for radical innovation at Google, and chiefly responsible for our greatest product and technical achievements. What I have seen during my 15 years at Google does not match that perception. I contend that the bulk of our successes have been the result of the methodical, relentless, and persistent pursuit of 1.3-2X opportunities -- what I have come to call "roofshots."
I love that the Internet is a very deeply physical thing that influences the design and implementation choices we make in digital systems and infrastructure. Props to Dropbox for a clever use of their client to improve the customer experience.
One of the most effective things you can do to be successful at your job is to understand how your organization works.Organizations have informal organizations and hidden leverage points. Knowing this and knowing the ones in your organization will make you a more effective engineer, even if you dislike "politics".
The FBI had obtained a warrant from a federal judge authorizing them to search and seize – to delete copies of – malicious software that had been surreptitiously installed in privately owned servers used to manage emails using Microsoft Exchange. The noteworthy part: The FBI was removing the malware first and attempting to notify the servers’ owners after the fact. This approach is almost unprecedented.
The United States needs a new social contract for the digital age—one that meaningfully alters the relationship between public and private sectors and proposes a new set of obligations for each. [...]
A similarly innovative shift in the cyber-realm will likely require an intense process of development and iteration. Still, its contours are already clear: the private sector must prioritize long-term investments in a digital ecosystem that equitably distributes the burden of cyberdefense. Government, in turn, must provide more timely and comprehensive threat information while simultaneously treating industry as a vital partner. Finally, both the public and private sectors must commit to moving toward true collaboration—contributing resources, attention, expertise, and people toward institutions designed to prevent, counter, and recover from cyber-incidents.
Facebook paid a cybersecurity firm six figures to develop a zero-day in Tails to identify a man who extorted and threatened girls.