China’s Police State Targets Zero-Covid Protesters


It was another busy week in security that saw big news about protests, surveillance, spyware, data breaches, and more. In the US, recent court filings detail how the FBI’s use of a controversial warrant yielded a trove of Google’s location data from thousands of devices in and around the Capitol on January 6. Meanwhile, in Iran, videos of antigovernment protests shared on social media highlight the importance of Twitter’s role in documenting human rights abuses and the consequences if the social media platform breaks.

On November 30, Google’s Threat Analysis Group moved to block a Spanish hacking framework that targets desktop computers. The exploitation framework, dubbed Heliconia, came to Google’s attention after a series of anonymous submissions to the Chrome bug reporting program. While Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla have all patched the Heliconia vulnerabilities, it’s a good reminder to keep your devices updated. ​​Here’s what you need to know about all the important security updates released in the past month.

Google researchers also found this week that the encryption keys phone-makers use to verify software on their devices are genuine—including the Android operating system itself—were stolen and used in malware.

Finally, we published part six of WIRED reporter Andy Greenberg’s series, “The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin,” which chronicles the downfall of AlphaBay, the world’s largest dark-web marketplace. Read the final installment here, and check out the full book from which the series was excerpted, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, available now from wherever you buy books.

And there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. 

A deadly fire in an apartment building sparked massive demonstrations in China where thousands of protestors in major cities have taken to the streets in defiance of the nation’s zero-Covid policy. The current wave of protests—the scale of which has not been seen in the country since the deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—has been met with the massive…

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