Tag Archive for: finally

How the FBI Finally Got Into the San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone

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As the Biden administration moves on an ever-growing list of policy initiatives, the White House issued sanctions this week for a slate of Russian misdeeds, including interference in the 2020 election, the poisoning of dissident Aleksey Navalny, and the SolarWinds hacking spree that swept United States government agencies and many private-sector companies. The retaliatory move is complicated when it comes to SolarWinds, though, because it comprised the sort of espionage operation that would typically fall within geopolitical norms. 

Elsewhere in the US government, the Justice Department took a drastic step this week to halt a Chinese hacking spree by authorizing the FBI to obtain a warrant and then directly delete attackers’ hacking infrastructure from hundreds of victims’ internal systems. Many in the security community lauded the effort, but the move also stoked some controversy given the precedent it could set for future US government actions that might be more invasive.

Over in the fraught world of internet-of-things security, researchers published findings on Tuesday that more than 100 million embedded devices and IT management servers are potentially vulnerable to attack, because of flaws in fundamental networking protocols. The devices are made by numerous vendors and used in environments from regular offices to health care and critical infrastructure, potentially exposing those networks to attack.

If you’re trying to lock your accounts down and reduce your reliance on passwords, we have a guide to alternatives that’ll walk you through on a number of platforms. And if you’re feeling a general sense of existential dread about all manner of threats, you’re not alone—the US Intelligence Community seems to be feeling the same way.

And there’s more. Each week we round up all the news WIRED didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

In 2016 the US government famously tried to compel Apple to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The case could have set a precedent that the government could demand that tech companies undermine the security protections in their products or insert “backdoors.” (Several…

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A Broken Piece of Internet Backbone Might Finally Get Fixed

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This spring, services from heavy hitters like Google and Facebook seemed glitchy or inaccessible for people worldwide for more than an hour. But it wasn’t a hack, or even a glitch at any one organization. It was the latest mishap to stem from design weaknesses in the “Border Gateway Protocol,” the internet’s foundational, universal routing system. Now, after years of slow progress implementing improvements and safeguards, a coalition of internet infrastructure partners is finally turning a corner in its fight to make BGP more secure.

Today the group known as Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security is announcing a task force specifically dedicated to helping “content delivery networks” and other cloud services adopt the filters and cryptographic checks needed to harden BGP. In some ways the step is incremental, given that MANRS has already formed task forces for network operators and what are known as “internet exchange points,” the physical hardware infrastructure where internet service providers and CDNs hand off data to each others’ networks. But that process coming to the cloud represents tangible progress that has been elusive up until now.

“With nearly 600 total participants in MANRS so far, we believe the enthusiasm and hard work of the CDN and cloud providers will encourage other network operators around the globe to improve routing security for us all,” says Aftab Siddiqui, the MANRS project lead and a senior manager of internet technology at the Internet Society.

BGP is often likened to a GPS navigation service for the internet, enabling infrastructure players to swiftly and automatically determine routes for sending and receiving data across the complex digital topography. And like your favorite GPS mapping tool, BGP has quirks and flaws that don’t usually cause problems, but can occasionally land you in major bridge traffic. This happens when entities like internet service providers “advertise a bad route,” sending data on a haphazard, ill-advised journey across the internet and often into oblivion. That’s when web services start to seem like they’re down. And the risks from this…

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IoT security: Are we finally turning the corner?

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Better IoT security and data protection are long overdue. Will they go from an afterthought to everyone’s priority any time soon?

As October draws to a close, so does Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we can all sit back and congratulate each other on a job well done and forget about the need to think about cybersecurity for another year. If only it was that simple! The need to proactively consider security every day has never been greater, especially given that the number of connected devices is predicted to grow at unprecedented levels from approximately 20 billion today to anywhere between 50 billion through to 75 billion by 2025, depending on whose estimate you believe. The broad range is probably a good indication that experts have no true prediction on how quickly people, industry and infrastructure will adopt new technology.

This growth, in part, can be attributed to increased availability of bandwidth and new generations of mobile connectivity. The implementation of 5G networks provides superior reliability with negligible latency and will extend and empower a new wave of opportunity and innovation for connected devices. The impact is likely to be witnessed in every industry: healthcare, agriculture, logistics, transportation, you name it… in fact, it’s difficult to think of an industry that will not benefit from the advanced communication that 5G offers.

Internet and Things

Today though, take a walk down the street; the growth of consumer connected devices is there to see, connected doorbells, home-security systems, connected cars and people jogging past with their smart watches and fitness trackers, through to solar panels with real-time energy efficiency monitors. It is not only consumers automating and adopting technology for convenience though; the cities we live in are also turning to technology to offer services, bike and scooter rental stations, automated visitor kiosks and such like.

Industry and infrastructure are also on board. Industrial washing machines, pumps, carts, traffic monitoring and pollution sensors demonstrate that devices…

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