Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images ) On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police …

Enlarge / The cityscape from the tower of the Lviv Town Hall in winter. (credit: Anastasiia Smolienko / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images ) As Russia has tested every form of attack on Ukraine's civilians over the past decade, both digital and physical, it's often used winter as one of its …

Enlarge (credit: Malte Mueller / Getty ) Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft —and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to …

Enlarge (credit: Flavio Coelho/Getty Images) Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down. Michael, who is based in Europe and asked …

Enlarge (credit: Kuzmik_A/Getty Images ) Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the …

Enlarge (credit: Joan Cros via Getty ) When Microsoft revealed in January that foreign government hackers had once again breached its systems, the news prompted another round of recriminations about the security posture of the world’s largest tech company. Despite the angst among policymakers, security experts, and competitors, Microsoft …

Enlarge (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus ) For months, Change Healthcare has faced an immensely messy ransomware debacle that has left hundreds of pharmacies and medical practices across the United States unable to process claims. Now, thanks to an apparent dispute within the ransomware criminal ecosystem, it may have just …

Enlarge (credit: John Keeble/Getty Images ) Thousands of people using the London Underground had their movements, behavior, and body language watched by AI surveillance software designed to see if they were committing crimes or were in unsafe situations, new documents obtained by WIRED reveal. The machine-learning software was combined …

Enlarge (credit: WIRED staff/Getty Images ) Hacker-for-hire firms like NSO Group and Hacking Team have become notorious for enabling their customers to spy on vulnerable members of civil society. But as far back as a decade ago in India, a startup called Appin Technology and its subsidiaries allegedly played …

Microsoft's Cybercrime Center. (credit: Microsoft) Governments and the tech industry around the world have been scrambling in recent years to curb the rise of online scamming and cybercrime. Yet even with progress on digital defenses, enforcement, and deterrence, the ransomware attacks, business email compromises, and malware infections keep on …

Enlarge / Karim Khan speaks at Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace during the visit of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in Bogota, Colombia, on June 6, 2023. (credit: Long Visual Press/Getty ) For years, some cybersecurity defenders and advocates have called for a kind of Geneva Convention for …

Enlarge (credit: Wired staff; Getty Images) For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them …

Enlarge (credit: sakchai vongsasiripat/Getty Image) ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network …

Enlarge (credit: Lorenzo Capunata/Getty ) The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (Arpa-H), a research support agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services, said today that it is launching an initiative to find and help fund the development of cybersecurity technologies that can specifically improve …

Enlarge (credit: Savusia Konstantin | Getty Images ) Thousands of websites belonging to US government agencies, leading universities, and professional organizations have been hijacked over the last half decade and used to push scammy offers and promotions, new research has found. Many of these scams are aimed at children and attempt …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) One of your Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings on Saturday about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism …

Enlarge (credit: Jose A. Bernat Bacete ) Travel rewards programs like those offered by airlines and hotels tout the specific perks of joining their club over others. Under the hood, though, the digital infrastructure for many of these programs—including Delta SkyMiles, United MileagePlus, Hilton Honors, and Marriott Bonvoy—is …

Enlarge (credit: WIRED staff ) The summer patch cycle shows no signs of slowing down, with tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft releasing multiple updates to fix flaws being used in real-life attacks. July also saw serious bugs squashed by enterprise software firms SAP, Citrix, and Oracle. Here’s everything …

Enlarge (credit: Evgen_Prozhyrko via Getty ) For more than 25 years, a technology used for critical data and voice radio communications around the world has been shrouded in secrecy to prevent anyone from closely scrutinizing its security properties for vulnerabilities. But now it’s finally getting a public airing thanks …

Enlarge (credit: AHMET YARALI/Getty ) Meta's long-awaited Twitter alternative is here, and it's called Threads. The new social media app launches at a time when alternatives, like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Spill, are vying for users who are dissatisfied with Elon Musk's handling of Twitter's user experience, with its newly …

Enlarge (credit: Bet_Noire/Getty ) From TikTok to Huawei routers to DJI drones, rising tensions between China and the US have made Americans—and the US government—increasingly wary of Chinese-owned technologies. But thanks to the complexity of the hardware supply chain, encryption chips sold by the subsidiary of a …

Enlarge (credit: BeeBright/Getty Images) Hiding malicious programs in a computer’s UEFI firmware, the deep-seated code that tells a PC how to load its operating system, has become an insidious trick in the toolkit of stealthy hackers. But when a motherboard manufacturer installs its own hidden backdoor in …

Enlarge (credit: aquatarkus/Getty Images) You know that you're supposed to wipe your smartphone or laptop before you resell it or give it to your cousin. After all, there's a lot of valuable personal data on there that should stay in your control. Businesses and other institutions need to …

Enlarge (credit: Don Farrall/Getty Images) In February, attackers from the Russia-based BlackCat ransomware group hit a physician practice in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, that's part of the Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN). At the time, LVHN said that the attack “involved” a patient photo system related to radiation oncology …

Enlarge (credit: Celestino Arce/Getty Images) Amidst the tragic toll of Russia's brutal and catastrophic invasion of Ukraine, the effects of the Kremlin's long-running campaign of destructive cyberattacks against its neighbor have often—rightfully—been treated as an afterthought. But after a year of war, it's becoming clear that …