Plus: Microsoft expands access to premium security features, AI child sexual abuse material is on the rise, and Netflix’s password crackdown has its intended effect.

Microsoft wrote last week that its “investigations have not detected any other use of this pattern by other actors and Microsoft has taken steps to block related abuse.” But if the stolen signing key could have been used to breach other services, even if it wasn’t used this way in the recent incident, the finding has significant implications for the security of Microsoft’s cloud services and other platforms.

The attack “seems to have a broader scope than originally assumed,” the Wiz researchers wrote. They added , “This isn't a Microsoft-specific issue—if a signing key for Google, Facebook, Okta, or any other major identity provider leaks, the implications are hard to comprehend.”

Microsoft’s products are ubiquitous worldwide, though, and Wiz’s Luttwak emphasizes that the incident should serve as an important warning.

“There are still questions that only Microsoft can answer. For example, when was the key compromised? And how?” he says. “Once we know that, the next question is, do we know it’s the only key that they had compromised?

In response to China’s attack on US government cloud email accounts from Microsoft—a campaign that US officials have described publicly as espionage—Microsoft announced this past week that it will make more of its cloud logging services free to all customers. Previously, customers had to pay for a license to Microsoft's Purview Audit (Premium) offering to log the data.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, Eric Goldstein, wrote in a blog post also published this past week that “asking organizations to pay more for necessary logging is a recipe for inadequate visibility into investigating cybersecurity incidents and may allow adversaries to have dangerous levels of success in targeting American organizations.”

Since OpenAI revealed ChatGPT to the world last November, the potential of generative AI has been thrust into the mainstream. But it isn't just text that can be created, and many of the emerging harms of the technology are only starting to be realized. This week, UK-based child safety charity the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which scours the web for child sexual abuse images and videos and removes them, revealed it is increasingly finding AI-generated abuse images online.

In June, the charity started logging AI images for the first time—saying it found seven URLs sharing dozens of images. These included AI generations of girls around 5 years old posing naked in sexual positions, according to the BBC. Other images were even more graphic. While generated content only represents a fraction of the child sexual abuse material available online overall, its existence is worrying experts. The IWF says it found guides on how people could create lifelike images of children using AI and that the creation of the images, which is illegal in many countries, is likely to normalize and encourage predatory behaviors toward children.

After threatening to roll out global password-sharing crackdowns for years, Netflix launched the initiatives in the US and UK at the end of May. And the effort seems to be going as planned. In earnings reported on Thursday, the company said that it added 5.9 million new subscribers in the past three months, a jump nearly three times higher than analysts predicted. Streaming subscribers have grown accustomed to sharing passwords and balked at Netflix’s strict new rules, which were prompted by stagnating new subscriber signups. But ultimately, at least a portion of account-sharers seem to have bit the bullet and started paying on their own.

China’s Breach of Microsoft Cloud Email May Expose Deeper Problems

A landmark $13 million settlement with the City of New York is the latest in a string of legal wins for protesters who were helped by a video-analysis tool that smashes the “bad apple” myth.

Beaten, blinded by pepper spray, corralled like animals, and indiscriminately arrested for marching against police violence and racial injustice. Such was the fate hundreds of people suffered at the hands of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in late May and early June of 2020, as thousands of people across the United States protested the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Three years later, a class action lawsuit has resulted in the City of New York agreeing to pay $9,950 each to some 1,380 protesters as part of a settlement. Costing taxpayers more than $13 million, it’s the largest amount paid to protesters in US history, according to the legal team behind the class action suit.

Lawyers secured the settlement with the aid of a little-known tool that helped them quickly categorize and analyze terabytes of video footage from police body cams, helicopter surveillance, and social media. “We had multiple weeks of protests. We had protests spanning the city of New York. We had thousands of arrests,” says David Rankin, a partner at the law firm Beldock, Levine & Hoffman who was part of the protesters’ legal team. “We had tens of thousands of hours of body cam footage, we had text messages, we had emails, we had just an absolute truckload of data to get through.”

The path through all this data was carved by Codec, a video categorization tool developed by the civil liberties-focused design agency SITU Research. Launched in June 2022, the tool is proving essential in legal battles around the world, where hours of disparate video footage can reveal orchestrated, state-backed violence against protesters.

Clip by Clip

Dozens of videos shared with WIRED show how the legal team built their case. Using this data, which also included geospatial information, time stamps, and the category of the alleged misconduct, we were able to build a map that allows anyone to watch the police incidents that were central to the lawsuit. Each dot represents an incident the legal team characterized as police misconduct. Of the 72 videos the legal team flagged as most pertinent to their case, the map includes 47 videos recorded by police body cams or surveillance cameras. The locations of the remaining 25 videos, which appear to have been taken from social media and other sources, are also pinpointed on the map. In total, the legal team analyzed more than 6,300 videos. 

Some of the videos on the map contain graphic violence, and viewer discretion is advised. Videos will autoplay with the sound on.

Video evidence was obtained from various sources, including police body cameras and helicopters. SITU Research geolocated the data and provided it to WIRED.

Among the videos we reviewed, an NYPD officer can be seen running down the sidewalk while pepper-spraying a person who’s standing against a building, entirely out of the officer’s way. In another video, an officer hits a protester with a car door while driving down the street. Another video shows a group of officers interlocking arms as one of them says, “Just like we fucking practiced.” The officers then charge a group of protesters before singling out a person on the sidewalk and beating them with batons. Taken together, the footage demonstrates widespread, systematic police misconduct during protests that spanned from May 28 to June 4, 2020, across multiple neighborhoods in New York City, according to the lawsuit.

While looting and vandalism took place in several neighborhoods during the protests, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. The defendants in the lawsuit have not admitted wrongdoing as part of the settlement, and city attorneys deny an orchestrated effort to violate protesters’ rights. Reached for comment, the NYPD referred WIRED to the city’s Law Department, which has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Remy Green, a partner at Cohen & Green and a member of the protesters’ legal team, says the use of police body cameras, which have been touted as a step in the right direction for civil liberties, has become “a kind of band-aid solution to police brutality.” A single video can only reveal so much, Green says, and police departments can use this limitation to obfuscate what really happened. Protests that are met with an extreme police response require a zoomed-out vantage point, which is what Codec allowed the legal team to create. “It gives you a much more comprehensive look at the activities that occurred,” says Green.

Hard Pivot

The idea of using Codec in the lawsuit came from a related case settled earlier this year. Here, Human Rights Watch worked with SITU Research to analyze video footage of protests in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, one of New York City’s five boroughs. Their work proved that the NYPD used an anti-protest tactic called “kettling”—trapping a group of people so they can’t escape—just prior to a government-mandated curfew, thus ensuring that they were in violation of the order. In March, a lawsuit against the city over the NYPD’s use of kettling ended in a $21,500 payout to each of more than 300 Mott Haven protesters, which is estimated to be the highest per-person settlement for a mass arrest in US history. The NYPD said in a statement following the settlement that it has since “re-envisioned” its “policies and training for policing large-scale demonstrations.”

Having seen the forensic video investigation SITU’s work on the Mott Haven protests produced, Rankin asked for help conducting a similar investigation. But this time it wouldn’t focus on police conduct during a single protest in one neighborhood, but rather protests across New York City.

Now an open source tool that’s free to use, Codec was first built for internal use only, according to Brad Samuels, a founding partner of SITU who oversees its research division. Codec categorizes video files using a range of criteria, including the location where a video was taken and the time and date it was recorded. Analysts can add their own parameters, such as whether a video shows police use of pepper spray, which enables them to more easily pinpoint clips that are relevant to an investigation.

Early on, the SITU team focused on international incidents, such as the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine and a 2019 uprising in Iraq in which security forces fired military-grade tear gas canisters directly at protesters’ heads. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the US-based SITU team “pivoted hard” to investigate domestic incidents. The agency’s focus on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests that followed resulted in investigations into police misconduct in Portland, Oregon, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Investigations in Mott Haven and across New York City are the latest to join that list.

The legal team behind the New York City-wide lawsuit, which operated through the National Lawyers Guild, a civil rights-focused nonprofit, obtained thousands of videos from the NYPD, the city, and social media feeds, most of which were unpublished until this week. Using Codec, analysts pinpointed four broad categories of what the legal team characterized as police misconduct: improper arrests, improper use of pepper spray, improper baton strikes, and excessive force.

While Codec greatly enhanced the legal team’s ability to analyze thousands of videos, it still took “a lot of human hours” to make the data usable and identify specific moments that were useful for their case, Rankin says. This included identifying the location of specific police interactions, categorizing the alleged misconduct, and adding accurate time stamps—all of which require ample hours of human work to complete, even with Codec’s help.

In future cases that require high-volume video analysis, however, that job may become easier. Samuels says the SITU team is currently working to add layers of machine learning and computer vision to Codec. He hopes that by next year the system can be tasked with, for example, detecting batons in footage—something that is currently done manually.

Widespread protests like those that took place in 2020 don’t often happen in the US. And Rankin points out that cases like the one settled this week are rare. But Green says they’re not nearly rare enough. “Our role as civil rights attorneys, I like to think, is to attempt to put ourselves out of a job,” Green says. “This settlement marks a high-water mark in terms of financial accountability, but I don’t see myself losing my job anytime soon.”

_Map creation and additional data work by Danielle Carrick_

NYPD Body Cam Data Shows the Scale of Violence Against Protesters

German researchers gained rare access to three satellites and found that they're years behind normal cybersecurity standards.

Hundreds of miles above Earth, thousands of satellites are orbiting the planet to keep the world running smoothly. Timing systems, GPS, and communications technologies are all powered by satellites. But for years, security researchers have warned that more needs to be done to secure the satellites against cyberattacks.

A new analysis from a group of German academics provides a rare glimpse into some of the security weaknesses in satellites currently circling the Earth. The researchers, from the Ruhr University Bochum and the Cispa Helmholtz Center for Information Security, have examined the software used by three small satellites and found that the systems lack some basic protections.

The satellites inspected by the researchers, according to an academic paper, contain “simple” vulnerabilities in their firmware and show “that little security research from the last decade has reached the space domain.” Among the problems are a lack of protection for who can communicate with the satellite systems and a failure to include encryption. Theoretically, the researchers say, the kinds of issues they discovered could allow an attacker to take control of a satellite and crash it into other objects.

There are multiple kinds of satellites in use today, ranging in size and purpose. Satellites created by commercial companies can be found photographing the Earth and providing navigation data. Military satellites are cloaked in secrecy and often used for spying. There are also research satellites, which are run by space agencies and universities.

Johannes Willbold, a PhD student at Ruhr University Bochum and the lead researcher behind the security analysis, says the current state of satellite security can be classed as “security by obscurity.” In other words: Little is known about how well they are protected. Willbold says the research team approached multiple organizations with satellites in space to ask if they could inspect their firmware, and the vast majority refused or didn’t reply—he praises the openness of the three that worked with his team.

The three satellites the team focused on are used for research, fly in low Earth orbit, and are largely operated by universities. The reserachers inspected the firmware of ESTCube-1, an Estonian cube satellite that launched in 2013; the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT, which is an open research platform; and the Flying Laptop, a mini satellite created by Stuttgart University and defense firm Airbus.

The researchers’ analysis says they found six kinds of security vulnerabilities across all three satellites and 13 vulnerabilities in total. Among these vulnerabilities were “unprotected telecommand interfaces,” which satellite operators on the ground use to communicate with the vehicles when they are in orbit. “Oftentimes, they lack access protection in the first place,” says Willbold, who is also presenting the research at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next month. “They’re essentially not checking anything.”

As well as the vulnerabilities within the satellites’ software, Willbold says, the team found an issue in a code library that appears to be used by multiple satellites. The research details a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in software developed by nanosatellite manufacturer GomSpace. The source of the problem, the research says, is within a library that was last updated in 2014. Willbold says GomSpace acknowledged the findings when the researchers reported the issue. GomSpace did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The creators of the satellites examined by the researchers told WIRED that providing their firmware to the researchers was beneficial and that they will take the findings on board for future spacecraft. Simon Plum, head of the Mission Operations Department at the European Space Agency (ESA), says a different level of security is applied to OPS-SAT than to other missions, as it is a “space laboratory.” However, Plum says ESA is reviewing the findings and has made at least one change to the satellite already. “We want to protect space systems from cyber threats and develop culture and common knowledge of resilience in the field of space cybersecurity,” Plum says.

Andris Slavinskis, an associate professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia who works on the ESTCube project, says the findings are “important and relevant” and that the ESTCube-1 system was “developed and launched during the Wild West times of the cubesat world.” A second version of the satellite, ESTCube-2, is set to launch this year. Meanwhile, Sabine Klinkner, a professor of satellite technology at Stuttgart University, which partly developed the Flying Laptop, says the “weaknesses” the researchers found are a result of trade-offs around functionality and access to the satellite.

“As with many university satellites, our threat model weighted the small incentives to attack an academic satellite against the still not completely trivial challenges in establishing a link and sending valid commands to the satellite,” Klinkner says. No malicious connections to the satellite have been spotted, Klinkner adds. And she says future missions will have increased cybersecurity measures to protect against threats.

Despite the satellite security analysis mostly focusing on research and academic satellites, it highlights wider security issues around satellites that experts have been concerned about for years. Gregory Falco, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on space cybersecurity, says it is rare for researchers to be able to get their hands on satellite firmware and publish research on it. There’s “almost nothing” publicly available that’s similar to the type of analysis the German team completed, Falco says.

The warnings about space systems aren’t new. Researchers have long said more needs to be done to protect space systems from attack and to improve how they are created. Falco says that space firmware and software development is a “nightmare” for two reasons. First, legacy software is often used in development and is rarely updated, Flaco says. “The other reason why is because space systems are not built by software developers. They are built by aerospace engineers, for the most part.” The German researchers also surveyed 19 satellite industry professionals about the levels of security in their systems. “We focused on providing a functioning system instead of a secure one,” one of those surveyed said, according to the academic paper.

Juliana Suess, a research analyst and policy lead on space security at the defense think tank Royal United Services Institute, explains that there are multiple ways satellite systems can be attacked, beyond software and firmware vulnerabilities. These include jamming and spoofing attacks, which interfere with the signals being transmitted to and from satellites. “You don't need to be a space power to do it,” Suess says. Last year, security researchers with permission demonstrated how a decommissioned satellite could be used to broadcast rogue TV signals. And in October 2007 and July 2008, Chinese hackers were blamed for disrupting two US satellites.

Suess believes the cyberattack against the Viasat satellite system at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year has acted as a further wake-up call to the space industry. In the early hours of February 24, 2022, when Russian troops first moved into Ukrainian land, a cyberattack interrupted thousands of modems from the satellite internet system. The attack knocked connections offline around the world, including German wind farms. The EU, UK, and US have linked the attack to Russia, and it has prompted the US National Security Agency to speak out about satellite security.

As experts continue to sound the alarm around space cybersecurity issues, the commercial space sector is going through a boom. SpaceX and other companies are racing to put thousands of satellites into orbit to provide internet connections, and it has become cheaper for satellites to photograph Earth from space. Alongside big firms, there’s a smaller array of companies building components and parts to be included in spacecraft. This supply chain poses extra security risks.

“They absolutely are not prioritizing security,” Falco says. “They probably don’t have any people who know anything about it on their staff.” In June of this year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association announced a new effort, which Falco is chairing, to introduce common practices and requirements for cybersecurity across the space industry. “There’s so much money that’s going into developing commercially led space systems, commercial entities need to have some guidance,” Falco says.

Satellites Are Rife With Basic Security Flaws

A bill to prevent cops and spies from buying Americans’ data instead of getting a warrant has a fighting chance in the US Congress as lawmakers team up against surveillance overreach.

United States lawmakers are moving with uncommon speed to close a loophole in federal law that police and intelligence agencies use to collect sensitive information on US citizens—up to and including their physical whereabouts—all without the need for a warrant.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Defense Intelligence Agency are among several government entities known to have solicited private data brokers to access information for which a court order is generally required. A growing number of lawmakers have come to view the practice as an end run around the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable government searches and seizures. 

“This unconstitutional mass government surveillance must end,” Warren Davidson, Republican congressman from Ohio, says. 

Members of the House Judiciary Committee, led by Ohio’s Jim Jordan, a Republican, will hold a markup hearing tomorrow to consider a Davidson bill aimed at restricting purchases of Americans’ data without a subpoena, court order, or warrant. If passed into law, the legislation's restrictions would apply to federal agencies as well as state and local police departments. Known as the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, the bill is cosponsored by four Republicans and four Democrats, including the committee’s ranking member, Jerry Nadler,  a Democrat, who first introduced it alongside California Democrat Zoe Lofgren in 2021. 

Notably, the bill's protections extend to data obtained from a person's account or device even if hacked by a third party, or when disclosure is referenced by a company's terms of service. The bill's sponsors note this would effectively prohibit the government from doing business with companies such as Clearview AI, which has admitted to scraping billions of photos from social media to fuel a facial recognition tool that's been widely tested by local police departments.

“The principle here is simple,” Nadler said when the legislation was first introduced two years ago. “The government should not be allowed to purchase its way around the rules Congress has enacted to protect the privacy of American citizens.”

In addition to Davidson, Nadler, and Lofgren, the bill is cosponsored by Republicans Andy Biggs, Ken Buck, and Thomas Massie, joining two other Democrats, Pramila Jayapal and Sara Jacobs.

An aide to Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee's Republican chairman, signaled that he would likewise support the bill, highlighting the degree to which domestic surveillance fears have risen to supersede fractious politics. The bill had been previously introduced by a bipartisan group of senators in 2021 and had acquired more than 20 cosponsors, including Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader. However, the legislation ultimately failed to make much headway in Congress.

A report declassified last month by the nation’s top intelligence official, Avril Haines, stated that a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” has been purchased by the intelligence community, including information that the US Supreme Court has previously ruled is protected by the Fourth Amendment. Senior congressional sources say many lawmakers were taken aback by the apparent breadth of the collection and of the warnings in the report about its potential to “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.” 

Other lawmakers are alarmed by the FBI’s disclosure of having purchased location information derived from people’s cell phones. During a hearing in March, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, told senators that the bureau had “previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project.”

Americans have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the US Supreme Court says, when it comes to certain digital information, including that which could reveal “the whole of their physical movements.” Such data—which the court describes as “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled”—need not be GPS-precise merely to justify a warrant. Nevertheless, the government has widely adopted the view that the Fourth Amendment does not apply when that same data is available to it commercially. 

When provided, the government's reasoning typically hinges on analysis of the landmark 2018 _Carpenter v. United States_ decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the government’s warrantless acquisition of cellular records, which can be used to track a person’s movements, had violated the rights of a 32-year-old man who'd been convicted of carrying out a string of robberies.

In its 5–4 opinion, the court refers to police demanding or “compelling” access to data, something that literal interpreters of the law say places commercial arrangements with data brokers squarely outside the scope of the court opinion. What's more, government lawyers have pointed to acknowledgment from the court that the debate over _Carpenter_ did not consider “collection techniques involving foreign affairs or national security.”

The Supreme Court has erstwhile framed the Fourth Amendment as a means to “plac\[ing\] obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance,” something that the Constitution’s authors deemed a “greater danger to a free people than the escape of some criminals from punishment.” Oft-cited by the court is a passage by a 19th-century American jurist: “Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.”

What rules or guidelines do exist within the intelligence community for purchasing commercial data often justify the activity by deeming the information “publicly available,” pointing to the fact that it may be open for purchase by not only private companies but foreign governments as well. While true and worrying, that is also irrelevant, says Bob Goodlatte, the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who now works as a senior policy adviser for the Project for Privacy & Surveillance Accountability, a pro-privacy group.

“None of those other entities can arrest you, can charge you with a crime, try you, sentence you, imprison you, restrain you, enjoin you, fine you, tax you,” Goodlatte says. “All of those are powers of government, and any American should be concerned about the ease with which the federal government can gather information about people.”

Sean Vitka, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress, whose slate of issues encompasses privacy and national security reforms, says domestic surveillance was proving to be one of the most bipartisan issues today in Congress, pointing not only to tomorrow’s markup hearing but a concurrent battle being fought over similar purchases by the US military. The House of Representatives last week voted to support an amendment to a defense spending bill requiring a warrant for all data typically protected by the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it's for sale. (The amendment was narrowed earlier in the week to exclude non-military agencies, including state and local police departments, which do not fall under the committee of jurisdiction's purview.)

The defense measure, and even the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, is a mere prelude to a much bigger fight coming this fall over what's considered the “crown jewel” of the US intelligence community: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

“We are now seeing momentous alignment of powerful political actors in favor of enacting major privacy protections for people in the United States,” says Vitka, “on the eve of the biggest fight over warrantless surveillance in generations.”

Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act Goes Back to Congress

Plus: A fitness app may have leaked the location of a murdered submarine captain, the privacy risks of filing taxes online, and how Facebook data was used in an abortion trial.

IPVM disputes this allegation and says it promptly contacted the FBI upon discovering the crimes.

A murdered Russian submarine captain may have been tracked by his killer through the Strava fitness app. According to the BBC, the commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, kept a public Strava profile that detailed his jogging routes—including one that took him through the park where he was killed early this week.

Privacy experts have been concerned about the dangers posed by social fitness apps like Strava for years. In 2018, for example, researchers exposed several secret US military installations using public data from soldiers tracking their fitness with the app.

While the killer’s motivations are currently unclear, Russian investigators say they arrested a man named Serhiy Denysenko, born in Ukraine, in connection with the murder. According to several Russian Telegram channels, Denysenko was the former head of the Ukrainian Karate Federation.

Ukrainian media reported that Rzhitsky commanded a Russian Kilo-class submarine that may have carried out a deadly missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia last year. Rhitsky’s personal information had previously been uploaded to the Ukrainian website Myrotvorets (Peacemaker), an unofficial database of people considered to be enemies of Ukraine, according to CNN.

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence did not take responsibility for the commander’s death. “Obviously, he was eliminated by his own men for refusing to continue to carry out combat orders from his command regarding missile attacks on peaceful Ukrainian cities,” the agency wrote in a statement.

A congressional investigation, led by US senator Elizabeth Warren, found that millions of Americans who file their taxes online with H&R Block, TaxSlayer, and TaxAct had financial information shared with Google and Facebook. The investigation was spurred by a 2022 report by The Markup that revealed how the three companies were transmitting sensitive data to Facebook through a tool called the Meta Pixel. The data was sent as taxpayers filed their taxes and contained personal information, including income and refund amounts.

Warren and six other lawmakers wrote to the US Justice Department this week, asking for criminal charges against the tax companies for breaking laws forbidding them from sharing their clients’ personal information. “The tax prep firms were shockingly careless with their treatment of taxpayer data,” the lawmakers wrote.

A third of the 80,000 most popular websites on the internet use the Meta Pixel, a 2020 investigation by The Markup found. Website operators include the pixel to measure clicks from their ads on Facebook’s platforms, but at the expense of their users’ privacy. Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Suicide Hotlines, and hospitals and have all been caught sending sensitive user data to Meta in the past few years.

The seven Democrats called on the US Internal Revenue Service to build its own free tax preparation software, though government services have also been caught using the Pixel to send data to Meta.

A Nebraska woman has pleaded guilty to criminal charges after helping her 17-year-old daughter with a medication abortion last year; key evidence against her included her Facebook messages. In mid-June of 2022, Nebraska police sent a warrant to Meta requesting private messages from the mother and daughter as part of an investigation into an illegal abortion, court documents show. The chats appear to show the mother instructing her daughter about how to take the pills. “Ya the 1 pill stops the hormones an rhen u gotta wait 24 HR 2 take the other,” reads one of her messages.

Since the US Supreme Court overturned _Roe v. Wade_ in June 2022, experts have raised serious concerns about the variety of ways data will be weaponized by law enforcement who want to prosecute people seeking abortions. Because Facebook Messenger doesn’t default to end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the way messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage do, people are especially vulnerable to criminal investigations if they use the platform.

According to a recent report from Reuters, prosecutors told a London court that a teenager associated with the hacking group Lapsus$ was responsible for high-profile hacks of Uber and fintech company Revolut in September of last year. Arion Kurtaj, who is 18, faces 12 charges, including three counts of blackmail, two counts of fraud, and six charges under the UK’s Computer Misuse Act.

The Uber hack reportedly cost the company $3 million in damages. At the time, Uber said the hacker who took responsibility posted pornographic material to an internal information page alongside the message: “Fuck you wankers.”

Kurtaj, along with an unnamed 17-year-old, is also facing allegations of blackmailing BT Group, EE, and Nvidia. Prosecutors described the pair as “key players” in Lapsus$. Kurtaj has been deemed not fit to stand trial by medical professionals; the jury will decide whether he is responsible for the hacking incidents rather than guilty of them.

Nude Videos of Kids From Hacked Baby Monitors Were Sold on Telegram

The FBI has collected sensitive data on millions of Americans without warrants, drawing intense scrutiny from Congress and turning the agency into a punching bag across the political divide.

Fears over the death of privacy in the United States are turning some of Washington’s most pronounced enemies into the strangest of bedfellows. Lawmakers usually thought incapable of reconciling even the smallest of differences are finding rare common ground over a shared mistrust of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a mutual disdain for domestic spying.

At a committee hearing Wednesday, US Representative Zoe Lofgren of California called out the FBI's director, Christopher Wray, over a disclosure he’d reluctantly made in March: Not long ago, he said, the FBI had circumvented the need to obtain search warrants by buying commercial data that revealed the whereabouts of an unknown number of Americans. Buying this data, rather than compelling its disclosure, allowed the FBI to forgo asking a judge’s permission—a requirement as of 2018, thanks to the Supreme Court decision _Carpenter v. United States._

Disturbed by this revelation, Lofgren—a 14-term Democrat and leader of past efforts to curb government surveillance on US soil—used the hearing to take a deeper interest in Wray’s claim that the data was originally collected for advertising purposes. Wray showed resistance to revealing anything new, saying only that the deal was legal and that his staff would follow up with Lofgren; that way, he added, “I don’t leave something important out.”

With limited time, Lofgren moved on to other concerns. But as her time expired she ended with a warning: “We’ll be looking into those warrant requirements later.” Jim Jordan, the committee's Republican chair, chimed in as Lofrgen’s microphone went dead. “We sure will,” he said. “We sure will.”

Since last year's raid on ex-president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the FBI has been persona non grata in most conservative circles. Widely despised on the right, the bureau is a boogeyman featured in many right-wing conspiracy theories, largely designed to explain away Trump’s election defeat and the role of his supporters in the insurrection that followed. Many of the questions that top Republicans put to Wray on Wednesday were seemingly designed to lend credence to these theories. A few members, like Matt Gaetz of Florida, dove deep into InfoWars-like waters.

One line of questioning was plainly meant to implicate the FBI in helping to plant a bomb outside of a Democratic Party building on the day of the insurrection. Unfortunately, it’s the bureau’s own troubled history that makes it so difficult to defend against such claims.

It fell mostly on Democrats like Lofgren to point out the irony in labeling an organization known for its Christian conservative leanings of being secretly chock-full of anarchists. Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado noted that Wray’s Wikipedia page lists him as a registered Republican. “I hope," he said, "you don’t change your party affiliation after this hearing is over.”

One of the farthest-right members in the House, Gaetz took his turn questioning Wray immediately after Lofgren. His first words were in her defense. “The American people need to understand what just happened,” he railed. “My Democratic colleague just asked the director of the FBI whether or not they are buying information about our fellow Americans, and the answer is, ‘Well, we’ll just have to get back to you.’”

In an exchange overheard by an Associated Press reporter present for the hearing, Gaetz also heaped praise on another political rival moments after she, too, laid into the director. (“That was terrific," he reportedly said.)

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington had dedicated much of her time to drawing attention to a report declassified last month by Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence and America’s “top spy.” The report states that the purchasing of personal information typically protected under the US constitution—GPS data pulled largely from cell phones, in particular—is a widespread practice throughout the intelligence community (of which, notably, the FBI is a member).

The report deems the data being actively collected by the US government to be both “sensitive and intimate.” In the wrong hands, a group of former spies turned advisers to Haines wrote, Americans would be vulnerable to serious crimes like harassment, identity theft, and blackmail. Intelligence agencies collect this data, nevertheless, the report states, using a legal theory that paying for it removes any need to obtain a search warrant.

Privacy experts at digital rights groups, including Demand Progress and the American Civil Liberties Union, consider this practice a legal loophole at odds with the US Constitution's goal of protecting against unlawful searches and seizures. Many lawmakers, including Jayapal and Lofgren, feel similarly.

Wray went on to explain that his story had not changed since he first disclosed the purchases in March and that the FBI was not actively purchasing location data at this moment. It is unclear what exactly became of the data it did purchase or how it was used, if at all. The FBI has said the data was collected by private companies for advertising purposes and that it was acquired by the government for a vague “pilot project.” An FBI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The protection of location and web browsing data were not the only concern raised by lawmakers Wednesday. Republican Thomas Massie would also pepper Wray with questions about another FBI request for “gun purchase records” reportedly issued to a major US bank. The records, Massie claimed, had “no geographical boundaries,” meaning the request was likely not limited to a particular area, city, or state.

Wray resisted the questions, as he had for most of the hearing. “What I do know,” the director said, “is that a number of business community partners all the time—including financial institutions–share information with us about possible criminal activity.” Massie then asked Wray to clarify whether the bank had volunteered the data or whether the FBI had requested it first.

Wray declined to respond to the question, saying he could not “speak to specifics.”

Wray was not entirely opposed to the idea of bettering privacy protections for at least some Americans. Law enforcement officers, he noted, face threats of violence every day as a result of being doxed online. “The more information, personalized information, about law enforcement professionals that is on the internet, the more people who may be unstable or inclined to violence there are out there who can choose to act on it,” he said.

But police officers, who are armed and trained to defend themselves from a variety of dangers, are not the only people who face such threats. As past reporting has shown, however, they are, on occasion, the ones who are doing the doxing.

Separately, another House committee on Thursday advanced an amendment to a “must-pass” defense spending bill that would order all US military departments to forgo purchasing data that would “otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena.” This would include the same type of location-based purchases previously acknowledged by the FBI, though the FBI itself is not bound by the amendment. The new law would, instead, cover roughly half of the US intelligence community’s 17 members—those, such as the National Security Agency and Office of Naval Intelligence, that fall under the Defense Department’s umbrella.

Previously, several agencies reporting to the Defense Department, including special operations teams and the Defense Intelligence Agency, have acknowledged purchasing commercial data that would normally have required a warrant.

Whether the defense amendment—introduced by Warren Davidson, a Republican—will survive Congress and eventually become law is impossible to say at this juncture. But the fact that it was adopted by the House of Representatives at all is nothing short of a watershed moment for privacy defenders; a reflection of the growing unease among US lawmakers with the government's current outlook on its authority to warrantlessly surveil its own citizens.

FBI Surveillance Fears Are Uniting a Badly Broken Congress

Microsoft says hackers somehow stole a cryptographic key, perhaps from its own network, that let them forge user identities and slip past cloud defenses.

For most IT professionals, the move to the cloud has been a godsend. Instead of protecting your data yourself, let the security experts at Google or Microsoft protect it instead. But when a single stolen key can let hackers access cloud data from dozens of organizations, that trade-off starts to sound far more risky.

Late Tuesday evening, Microsoft revealed that a China-based hacker group, dubbed Storm-0558, had done exactly that. The group, which is focused on espionage against Western European governments, had accessed the cloud-based Outlook email systems of 25 organizations, including multiple government agencies.

Those targets encompass US government agencies including the State Department, according to CNN, though US officials are still working to determine the full scope and fallout of the breaches. An advisory from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says the breach, which was detected in mid-June by a US government agency, stole unclassified email data “from a small number of accounts.”

China has been relentlessly hacking Western networks for decades. But this latest attack uses a unique trick: Microsoft says hackers stole a cryptographic key that let them generate their own authentication “tokens”—strings of information meant to prove a user’s identity—giving them free rein across dozens of Microsoft customer accounts.

“We put trust in passports, and someone stole a passport-printing machine,” says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker who now teaches at the Institute for Applied Network Security in Boston. “For a shop as large as Microsoft, with that many customers impacted—or who could have been impacted by this—it’s unprecedented.”

In web-based cloud systems, users’ browsers connect to a remote server and, when they enter credentials like a username and password, they’re given a bit of data, known as a token, from that server. The token serves as a kind of temporary identity card that lets users come and go as they please within a cloud environment while only occasionally reentering their credentials. To ensure that the token can’t be spoofed, it’s cryptographically signed with a unique string of data known as a certificate or key that the cloud service possesses, a kind of unforgeable stamp of authenticity.

Microsoft, in its blog post revealing the Chinese Outlook breaches, has described a kind of two-stage breakdown of that authentication system. First, hackers were somehow able to steal a key that Microsoft uses to sign tokens for consumer-grade users of its cloud services. Second, the hackers exploited a bug in Microsoft’s token validation system, which allowed them to sign consumer-grade tokens with the stolen key and then use them to instead access enterprise-grade systems. All of this occurred despite Microsoft’s attempt to check for signatures from different keys for those different grades of token.

Microsoft says it has now blocked all tokens that were signed with the stolen key and replaced the key with a new one, preventing the hackers from accessing victims’ systems. The company adds that it has also worked to improve the security of its “key management systems” since the theft occurred.

But exactly how such a sensitive key, allowing such broad access, could be stolen in the first place remains unknown. WIRED contacted Microsoft, but the company declined to comment further.

In the absence of more details from Microsoft, one theory of how the theft occurred is that the token-signing key wasn’t in fact stolen from Microsoft at all, according to Tal Skverer, who leads research at the security Astrix, which earlier this year uncovered a token security issue in Google’s cloud. In older setups of Outlook, the service is hosted and managed on a server owned by the customer rather than in Microsoft’s cloud. That might have allowed the hackers to steal the key from one of these “on-premises” setups on a customer’s network.

Then, Skverer suggests, hackers might have been able to exploit the bug that allowed the key to sign enterprise tokens to gain access to an Outlook cloud instance shared by all the 25 organizations hit by the attack. “My best guess is that they started from a single server that belonged to one of these organizations,” says Skverer, “and made the jump to the cloud by abusing this validation error, and then they got access to more organizations that are sharing the same cloud Outlook instance.”

But that theory doesn’t explain why an on-premises server for a Microsoft service inside an enterprise network would be using a key that Microsoft describes as intended for signing consumer account tokens. It also doesn’t explain why so many organizations, including US government agencies, would all be sharing one Outlook cloud instance.

Another theory, and a far more troubling one, is that the token-signing key used by the hackers was stolen from Microsoft’s own network, obtained by tricking the company into issuing a new key to the hackers, or even somehow reproduced by exploiting mistakes in the cryptographic process that created it. In combination with the token validation bug Microsoft describes, that may mean it could have been used to sign tokens for any Outlook cloud account, consumer or enterprise—a skeleton key for a large swath, or even all, of Microsoft’s cloud.

The well-known web security researcher Robert “RSnake” Hansen says he read the line in Microsoft’s post about improving the security of “key management systems” to suggest that Microsoft’s “certificate authority”—its own system for generating the keys for cryptographically signing tokens—was somehow hacked by the Chinese spies. “It’s very likely there was either a flaw in the infrastructure or configuration of Microsoft’s certificate authority that led an existing certificate to be compromised or a new certificate to be created,” Hansen says.

If the hackers did in fact steal a signing key that could be used to forge tokens broadly across consumer accounts—and, thanks to Microsoft’s token validation issue, on enterprise accounts, too—the number of victims could be far greater than 25 organizations Microsoft has publicly accounted for, warns Williams.

To identify enterprise victims, Microsoft could look for which of their tokens had been signed with a consumer-grade key. But that key could have been used to generate consumer-grade tokens, too, which might be far harder to spot given that the tokens might have been signed with the expected key. “On the consumer side, how would you know?” Williams asks. “Microsoft hasn’t discussed that, and I think there’s a lot more transparency that we should expect.”

Microsoft’s latest Chinese spying revelation isn’t the first time state-sponsored hackers have exploited tokens to breach targets or spread their access. The Russian hackers who carried out the notorious Solar Winds supply chain attack also stole Microsoft Outlook tokens from victims’ machines that could be used elsewhere on the network to maintain and expand their reach into sensitive systems.

For IT administrators, those incidents—and particularly this latest one—suggest some of the real-world trade-offs of migrating to the cloud. Microsoft, and most of the cybersecurity industry, has for years recommended the move to cloud-based systems to put security in the hands of tech giants rather than smaller companies. But centralized systems can have their own vulnerabilities—with potentially massive consequences.

“You’re handing over the keys to the kingdom to Microsoft,” says Williams. “If your organization is not comfortable with that now, you don’t have good options.”

How a Cloud Flaw Gave Chinese Spies a Key to Microsoft’s Kingdom

Ransomware attacks tumbled in 2022, offering hope that the tide was turning against the criminal gangs behind them. Then things got a whole lot worse.

Amid a concerted effort by global law enforcement to crack down on ransomware attacks, payments to hackers and even the volume of attacks fell in 2022. But the trend doesn’t seem to be holding for 2023, and attacks have shot up again.

Data from cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis indicates that victims have paid ransomware groups $449.1 million in the first six months of this year. For all of 2022, that number didn’t even reach $500 million. If this year’s pace of payments continues, according to the company’s data, the total figure for 2023 could hit $898.6 million. This would make 2023 the second biggest year for ransomware revenue after 2021, in which Chainalysis calculates that attackers extorted $939.9 million from victims.

The findings track with general observations from other researchers that the volume of attacks has spiked this year. And they come as ransomware groups have become more aggressive and reckless about publishing sensitive and potentially damaging stolen information. In a recent attack against the University of Manchester, hackers directly emailed the UK university’s students telling them that seven terabytes of data had been stolen and threatening to publish "personal information and research" if the university didn’t pay up.

“We think as a result of their budgetary shortfalls in 2022 we’ve seen these more extreme extortion techniques, ways to kind of twist the knife,” says Jackie Burns Koven, head of cyber threat intelligence at Chainalysis. “In 2022 we were very surprised to find that decline. Then we talked to external partners—incident response firms, insurance companies—and they all said, yeah, we’re paying less, and we’re also seeing fewer attacks.”

Chainalysis and other organizations attributed the slump in 2022 to a number of factors. Expanded security protections and preparedness played a role, as did the availability of decryption tools offered by private companies and the FBI to help ransomware victims unlock their data without paying attackers. Chainalysis also believes that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacted the day-to-day operations of a number of prominent ransomware groups, which are primarily based in Russia.

Improvements in how potential victims defend themselves along with government deterrence initiatives haven’t fallen off in 2023. But Chainalysis researchers suspect that the evolving state of Russia’s war in Ukraine must explain this year’s increased ransomware activity, or at least be playing a role.

“I really think the tide of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has impacted these numbers,” Chainalysis’ Koven says. “Whether that’s actors have settled into safe locations, whether their year of military service has finished, or whether perhaps there’s a mandate to release the hounds.”

Chainalysis specializes in cryptocurrency surveillance and tracking, so researchers at the company are well positioned to capture the scope and scale of ransomware payments. The company says it takes a conservative approach and is rigorous about continuing to retroactively update its annual totals and other figures as new data comes to light about historic transactions. In general, though, many researchers emphasize that true totals for ransomware attacks or payments are virtually impossible to calculate given available information, and that numbers like those from Chainalysis or government tracking can be used only as broad characterizations of trends.

"We still have such poor insights on the actual number of attacks," says Pia Huesch​, a research analyst at the British defense and security think tank Royal United Services Institute. She adds that companies are still reluctant to talk about attacks, fearing reputational harm.

In May, officials at the UK's National Cybersecurity Center and data regulator the Information Commissioner's Office said they were increasingly concerned about companies not reporting ransomware attacks and “the ransoms paid to make them go away.” They warned that if incidents are “covered up,” the number of attacks will only increase.

"Individuals who engage in cybercrime, to them the benefits still massively outweigh the risks of perhaps being prosecuted," Huesch says.

Regardless of their ability to independently validate ransomware revenue totals like those put forward by Chainalysis, researchers agree that ransomware represents a dire threat in 2023 and that the most prolific groups, most of whom are based in Russia, are evolving to counter defenses and meet the current moment.

“The ransomware groups who are still around are really good at what they do, and it is hard for organizations to secure against all possible points of entry,” says Allan Liska, an analyst for the security firm Recorded Future who specializes in ransomware. “And what’s worse, the groups seem to be mastering new techniques.”

One such tactic that researchers and governments have their eye on is mass exploitation campaigns in which a ransomware group finds a vulnerability in a widely used product that they can exploit to launch extortion campaigns against many organizations at once. The Russia-based gang Clop, in particular, has refined this technique.

All of this bodes poorly for anyone who hoped after last year that the tide was turning against ransomware actors.

Ransomware Attacks Are on the Rise, Again

Roger Thomas Clark, also known as Variety Jones, will spend much of the rest of his life in prison for his key role in building the world’s first dark-web drug market.

Nearly ten years ago, the sprawling dark-web drug market known as the Silk Road was torn offline in a law enforcement operation coordinated by the FBI, whose agents arrested the black market's boss, Ross Ulbricht, in a San Francisco library. It would take two years for Ulbricht's second-in-command—an elusive figure known as Variety Jones—to be tracked down and arrested in Thailand. Today, a decade after the Silk Road's demise, Clark has been sentenced to join his former boss in federal prison.

In a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, Roger Thomas Clark—also known by his online handles including Variety Jones, Cimon, and Plural of Mongoose—was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for his role in building and running Silk Road. Clark, a 62-year-old Canadian national, will now likely spend much of the rest of his life incarcerated for helping to pioneer the anonymous, cryptocurrency-based model for online illegal sales of drugs and other contraband that still persists on the dark web today. The sentence is the maximum Clark faced in accordance with the plea agreement he made with prosecutors.

Clark “misguidedly turned his belief that drugs should be legal into material assistance for a criminal enterprise,” Judge Sidney Stein said in his sentencing statement. “These beliefs crossed over into patently illegal behavior.”

Stein added that Clark was “clear-eyed and intentional” in his work as Ulbricht's “right-hand man” in the Silk Road's operations. “The sentence must reflect the vast criminal enterprise of which he was a leader,” Stein said.

In his own statement, Clark said that his work on the Silk Road had always been motivated by his political belief that drugs should be legalized, and the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dark-web drug sales he helped to facilitate were safer than drug deals that took place in the physical world. He argued in his sentencing statement that the site helped reduce violence in the drug trade, and that the Silk Road's ratings and reviews prevented the sale of adulterated drugs that would have caused greater harm.

“I just kept preaching to myself ‘harm reduction.’ That's how I got to sleep at night,” Clark told the judge, standing before a sparse audience in the courtoom looking thin and gaunt in baggy khaki clothes. “I'm proud and ashamed at the same time.”

Clark was, as prosecutors noted in their memo arguing for the two-decade sentence, more than a lieutenant on the Silk Road. He served as the site's security consultant, PR adviser, and even a kind of executive coach and friend to the site's boss, Ulbricht. Clark, who Ulbricht initially encountered as a marijuana seeds dealer on the market, was “the biggest and strongest-willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ulbricht wrote in his journal. 

“He has advised me on many technical aspect of what we are doing, helped me speed up the site and squeeze more out of my current servers," Ulbricht wrote. “He also has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name, devising rules, and on and on. He also helped me get my head straight regarding legal protection, cover stories, devising a will, finding a successor, and so on. He’s been a real mentor.”

Clark was pivotal in key moments of the Silk Road’s history—including a particularly dark incident when he and Ulbricht resorted to violence, which loomed large in Clark’s sentencing. Clark played a crucial role in convincing Ulbricht that it was necessary to commission the murder of one of his employees who he believed had betrayed him and stolen bitcoins from the market. “At what point in time do we decide we’ve had enough of someones shit and terminate them?” Clark wrote to Ulbricht at one point following the discovery of the theft, as recorded in chat logs that were recovered from Ulbricht's computer after his arrest. “We’re playing with big money with serious people, and that’s the world they live in.”

After Ulbricht agreed to have the staffer killed—in a bizarre turn, his death was instead faked by US federal agents investigating the Silk Road—Clark told Ulbricht that he had made the right move. "If you had balked, I would have seriously re-considered our relationship," he wrote. “We’re playing for keeps, this just drives it home. I’m perfectly comfortable with the decision, and I’ll sleep like a lamb tonight, and every night hereafter.”

Countering Clark's claims of interest in “harm reduction,” assistant US attorney Michael Neff pointed to those comments as evidence of Clark's “complete disregard for human life,” as he put it in Tuesday's sentencing hearing. For Clark, “the question of whether to end another man's life was simple and stress-free,” Neff told the judge in the prosecution's sentencing statement.

In his own remarks, Clark didn't comment on that murder-for-hire conversation—which he at one point claimed had been fabricated by Ulbricht but later conceded was real. Instead, he focused on his benevolent intentions in running the Silk Road, which he argued had saved thousands of lives through its prevention of overdoses from adulterated drugs. At the same time, he acknowledged that at least six people named by prosecutors had in fact overdosed and died from Silk Road narcotics.

“If the Silk Road hadn't existed, would those people be alive today? Probably yes,” Clark said. “Did we save thousands of lives? Yes, but we took some too.”

He compared his actions to the so-called “trolley problem” thought experiment in ethical philosophy, in which someone must choose which track a train will take when people are tied to both tracks. “It's not Philosophy 101 for me,” he told the judge. “I pulled the switch.”

Clark and his defense attorney also spent much of their sentencing statements describing the abysmal conditions of his detention over the past several years in Thailand and then a New York jail. His attorney told the court he was traumatized by witnessing torture and sexual assault in a Thai jail, was denied basic health care, and arrived in the US weighing just 93 pounds. At the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Clark described corruption and neglect, which led to his falling from his bunk while experiencing vertigo in 2021, breaking his pelvis, and being left to suffer overnight despite his pleas for help.

Judge Stein acknowledged those years of suffering and mistreatment but concluded that he was “not persuaded they afford a substantial reduction” in Clark's sentence.

Separately, Clark made strange new claims in his statement—without evidence—that he had spent $800,000 of Silk Road’s revenue to buy hacking tools that could be used to de-anonymize users of the dark web engaged in child sexual exploitation and had then provided those tools to the UK and US governments. One Bangkok-based hacker who Clark says sold him a hacking tool, who goes by the handle the Grugq, denied any such sale to WIRED. “I never sold such an exploit and certainly wouldn’t have sold it to him,” the Grugq writes. The judge didn’t appear to factor these unsubstantiated claims into Clark’s sentence, but suggested that he should provide his computer skills to the US government.

Clark's strange story of hacking pedophiles should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt given his long history of apparent misdirection. Prior to his extradition from Thailand, he made claims of a corrupt FBI agent hunting him and secret information he could provide to the Thai government, ostensibly in exchange for his release—claims which were never borne out or mentioned by his defense prior to sentencing.

In his chats with Ulbricht prior to the Silk Road takedown, too, Clark had a tendency to grandiose ideas. At one point he suggested ways that he might rescue Ulbricht from prison should he ever be identified and arrested. “One of the things i’d like us to look at investing in is a helicopter tour company … seriously, with the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come get you.” he wrote. “And remember that one day when your in the exercise yard, I’ll be the dude in the helicopter coming in low and fast, I promise.”

No such rescue operation ever appeared for Ulbricht. And no such salvation appears to be coming for Clark either.

“Everybody take a good look,” Clark said at one point during his sentencing statement, dramatically turning to the courtroom’s small audience. “This is probably the last time you see me before I get killed.”

Silk Road’s Second-in-Command, Variety Jones, Gets 20 Years in Prison

The popular communication platform launched a new child safety tool for parents. Here’s what the feature does (and doesn’t) include.

Discord started in 2015 as a communication platform for gamers. It’s now a sprawling hub of active servers where users can do everything from online dating to AI art creation. It goes much further than text and image-based chats. Discord users are able to form intimate connections with each other through live broadcasts of their audio and video, as well.

Anyone 13 or older is allowed to sign up, and parents are right to be concerned about who their children are befriending. According to NBC News, predators use the app to groom, kidnap, and extort minors as well as share child sexual abuse materials.

Discord’s new family center is a step toward protecting those young users, but it won’t prevent every instance of child exploitation, especially for teens whose parents are too busy to monitor their online activity. Other social media companies, like Snapchat, have also released security tools for parents.

Curious about signing up alongside your teen for this new safety tool? Here’s how to set up Family Center on Discord and a breakdown of what information is provided to parents.

How Do I Set Up Family Center?

As a parent, you will need to sign up for your own account before you can start using Family Center. Confused about how Discord works, exactly? Our beginner’s guide has tips to help you get started and navigate around (Android, Apple.)

After you’ve created an account, consider talking with your child about the importance of online safety and why these security settings are important. For Family Center to work, both the parent’s and the child’s account must opt in.

Go to **User Settings**, and then choose **Family Center**. Here, your teen will need to share a time-sensitive QR code for you to scan and complete the activation process. QR codes can be regenerated, if multiple parents want to sign up for Family Center.

What Information Do Parents Receive?

Once Family Center is activated, parents can use the Discord app to see who their teens added as friends in the past week. The tool also lists all of the servers they just joined and the servers they actively participate in. Whoever the teen called or messaged, whether directly or by group chats, is included as well.

You can check on this information during the week inside of the app, and Discord will send you an email every week with a summary of the data. Keep in mind that an archive of this activity isn’t available to you in the long term, so parents should save these weekly emails.

Does This Let Me Read Their Messages?

Nope! Even though parents are now able to see who their teens are chatting with on Discord, whatever is happening in their DMs, voice calls, and video chats remains hidden.

It can be quite hard for parents to balance giving their child more autonomy as they mature and the necessity of online safety precautions. Parents of teenagers who use Discord should consider activating Family Center, even if it doesn’t provide complete peace of mind. For more parenting advice, check out WIRED’s guide to the basics of protecting your kids online.

Source

Wired