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.

How to Use Discord’s Family Center With Your Teens

Cities across the US have established RTCCs that police say protect the rights of innocent people, but critics warn of creeping surveillance.

In the 1990s, London built the Ring of Steel—a network of concrete barriers, checkpoints, and thousands of video cameras around the historic City of London—after bombings by the Irish Republican Army. The idea was to monitor everyone entering and leaving the Square Mile, what the _The New York Times_ later called “fortress urbanism.”

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, city planners looking to defend New York from terrorism turned to London and fortress urbanism for inspiration. Fusion centers, where US law enforcement agencies share intelligence at a federal level to be analyzed and build a bigger picture of crime, had been around for a few years. But officials began asking, what if fusion centers could be localized? What if local law enforcement could analyze and gather masses of intelligence from one city?

In 2005, they answered with the first “real-time crime center” (RTCC), a sprawling network of CCTV and automatic license plate readers (ALPR) linked to a central hub in the New York Police Department headquarters costing $11 million. Since then, from Miami to Seattle, RTCCs have steadily expanded across the US. The Atlas of Surveillance, a project from the digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which monitors police surveillance technology, has counted 123 RTCCs nationwide—and that number is rising.

Each RTCC is slightly different, but their function is the same: gather surveillance data across a city and use that to build a live picture of crime in the city. Police departments have an array of technologies available to them that span from CCTV, gunshot sensors, and social media monitoring to drones and body cameras. In Ogden, Utah, police even floated the idea of a 30-foot “crime blimp.” In many cases, images that police systems collect are run through facial recognition technology, and the data gathered is often used in predictive policing. In Pasco County, Florida, which operates an RTCC, the sheriff’s office’s predictive policing system encouraged officers to continuously monitor and harass residents for minor code violations such as missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass.

Erik Lavigne is a detective at the Fort Worth Police Department in Texas and communications director at the National RTCC Association. He says there has been a boom in RTCCs over the past year because officers believe they help with more precise policing. He likens the scattered approach to policing in previous years to throwing out a fishnet and hoping to catch something. “For what we had at the time, that worked. But what inevitably happens is, you end up alienating the community because you're not just stopping the bad guys, you're also stopping innocent people that are just trying to live their lives,” he says. “A real-time crime center is a scalpel. We aren't catching the wrong people anymore.”

Lavigne says RTCCs are also a cheaper alternative to hiring more boots on the ground because each camera becomes, in effect, a stationary officer keeping watch over an area. Lavigne says this has proved so effective that analysts at RTCCs have been recording more crime than they can deal with, and  the Fort Worth RTCC has significantly helped decrease vehicle thefts.

Most evidence for RTCC effectiveness, however, is anecdotal, and there is a real lack of studies into how effective they really are. In Detroit, a National Institute of Justice study concluded that Project Green Light—a part of the Detroit Police Department RTCC that established cameras at more than 550 locations, including schools, churches, private businesses, and health centers—helped decrease property violence in some areas but did nothing to prevent violent and other crimes. But police departments argue they do work.

Few people know RTCCs even exist, let alone the extent of the surveillance they entail, so they can receive little public scrutiny and often operate without much oversight. There have long been concerns around how surveillance technologies could affect First and Fourth Amendment rights in the US, but Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher at the EFF, says RTCCs “hyper-charge” these worries by collating all this data in one place.

“It’s perpetuating this mass collection of people's private information from a whole bunch of different video streams,” Lipton says. “They're really lowering the bar on the ways police can access that information … When there are these types of large databases without proper audit and oversight mechanisms, law enforcement officials and individuals can use them for their own purposes, which can be very scary.”

Regulations around the storage and usage of this data are patchy at best. For example, RTCC-collected data may be shared across jurisdictions because third parties contracted for the hardware or software will also collect data and share it, Lipton says. “Some of these companies will, in good faith, delete data in accordance with retention schedules, but we've seen them not do that,” she says. “With large databases like license plate reader databases, that information is sometimes shared without police departments realizing it and in violation of jurisdictional rules.”

While companies will argue this data is being stored securely, this is no guarantee. In 2020, hackers stole internal memos, financial records, and more from over 200 local, state, and federal agencies from web development firm Netsential, which provided data storage for fusion centers across the US. The trove of leaked data later became known as #BlueLeaks.

“There are real concerns around having this amount of information stored somewhere,” says Lipton, “I have no reason to believe these are somehow more secure systems than we have in other situations. And we know that those get breached all the time, law enforcement agencies in this country get hacked all the time.”

Lipton’s biggest worry is that this ability to follow people remotely and share that data across state lines could instead be used to target people involved in protests and political organizing, which has already happened, or those accessing reproductive health care. “Those issues become compounded because there’s the frightening ‘real time’ element to it,” she says. “That means that if you leave your house, there’s a very good chance that law enforcement could jump into a feed that is just following you around.”

In addition to police setting up their own technology, RTCCs draw on wider existing surveillance networks. Cooperation of public institutions like schools and colleges and privately owned cameras have been crucial to developing RTCCs by giving officers access to cameras that might otherwise need a warrant. In Atlanta, which has seen the number of cameras integrated into their RTCC treble to 15,329 in the past year, four higher-education institutions—Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine—installed $700,000 worth of cameras, including five ALPRs, that were linked to the Atlanta RTCC.

Fusus, which claims to be “the most widely used & trusted Real-Time Crime Center platform in U.S. Public Safety,” sells hardware that can be connected to private CCTV cameras and linked up to the local RTCC. Fusus sells a solution that brings all the various technologies under “a single pane of glass,” as the company describes it. Through partnerships with companies that provide surveillance technology, including a $21 million investment from Axon, which produces Tasers and body cams, Fusus promises to integrate these technologies into one RTCC platform for analysts.

Police departments that use Fusus, like the Memphis Police Department, have been encouraging homeowners and local businesses to purchase fususCORE bundles—hardware that connects cameras to an RTCC—ranging from $350 to $7,300, plus an annual $150 subscription. Fusus has even gone as far as developing technology that allows Amazon’s Ring doorbells to livestream to an RTCC.

Amid a push for policing to harness new technologies and become “smarter,” Lipton is quick to point out that more technology doesn’t necessarily equal smarter. “It almost always just means that they're going to keep heavily policing poor and minority areas,” she says. Despite Lavigne’s claims that RTCCs mean the wrong people aren’t getting arrested anymore, in a recent lawsuit, the New Orleans Police Department was sued for arresting a Black man after watching him for 15 minutes through their RTCC and wrongly concluding he had a gun. The department ultimately settled for $10,000 in damages.

Lipton believes relentless surveillance is an infringement of citizens rights and would like to see the use of these technologies limited—aside from facial recognition, which she says should be banned. “There are certain elements we just shouldn't be using at all,” she says. “We should never be applying facial recognition to almost anything … As soon as you apply any really individualizing technology like that, I mean, it's kind of over for people's privacy.” Communities and organizations like EFF and ACLU have been arguing for Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws that bring surveillance technologies under the control of elected officials and communities. Cities like Oakland have found success with this, but without nationwide restrictions, the rise of RTCCs will likely continue on the periphery of the public eye.

The Quiet Rise of Real-Time Crime Centers

Plus: A French bill would allow spying via phone cameras, ATM skimmers target welfare families, and Japan’s largest cargo port gets hit with ransomware.

When Yevgeny Prighozin, the head of the notorious mercenary army known as the Wagner Group, staged an aborted coup against the Russian government, his brief revolt led to the deaths of 13 Russian fighter pilots and a serious blow to Vladimir Putin's sense of invulnerability. Now the fallout of that strange story has also apparently taken another casualty: the most notorious troll farm in the world, known as the Internet Research Agency.

But we'll get to that. First, Elon Musk is having a tough week. After Twitter’s baffling decision to temporarily limit the number of tweets users can read each day, Mark Zuckerberg sucker-punched the self-sabotaged platform with the launch of Threads. The Instagram-linked microblogging app surged to the top of the app store charts, gaining a staggering 30 million users in 24 hours—a clear sign that many people are willing to ignore Meta’s privacy-invading ways.

If you want to get in on the Threads action but don't want to share all your data with Meta, there's a better way: Don't join. Instead, wait until Threads connects to the broader decentralized social media ecosystem enabled by the ActivityPub protocol, which is also used by Mastodon. It should enable you to interact with Threads without signing up for an account or downloading the app. And if you're still trying to pick which Twitter alternative to jump on—or just want to see what data each platform collects—we've broken down the privacy policies of Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and more.

Even if you don't share your data with Meta, the information about you that's already out there is likely up for sale. But it's not just companies buying up your personal details—cops and spies are purchasing that data too. That is, unless the US Congress puts a stop to it. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has submitted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress must pass each year, that would forbid intelligence agencies from buying sensitive data about Americans. The amendment has to survive a long debate before it can become law, but if Congress keeps it intact, US spies will no longer be able to buy your location data and search histories on the open market.

Finally, our partners at Grist investigated the risks posed by electric vehicle charging stations. Due to a variety of security vulnerabilities and a lack of industry standards for protecting EV chargers from hackers, both drivers and the entire power grid could be at risk.

But that's not all. Each week, we round up the security news we didn't report in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

For years, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency embodied many Americans’ worst fears of Russia’s disinformation influences across Western social media. The operation, created by Vladimir Putin ally and oligarch Yevgeny Prighozin, fueled scandals, spewed fake news, and meddled in US elections deeply enough to warrant an indictment from the Justice Department against a group of its staff and even a disruptive hacking operation from US Cyber Command targeting its network.

Now, after the US government's attempts to cripple or kill Prighozin’s troll factory, he’s managed to do it himself. In the wake of the bizarre, brief mutiny of Prighozin’s mercenary Wagner Group, contracted to take part in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prighozin has been stripped of assets in Russia, including the media group of which the Internet Research Agency was a part. Initially, the troll farm sought a new owner, but Reuters reported ahead of the July 4 holiday that the infamous influence machine will instead be disbanded. Prighozin, meanwhile, was said to have been exiled to Belarus—but has now returned to Russia, according to the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko.

A highly controversial surveillance bill in France, making its way through the country’s parliament, would allow law enforcement to surreptitiously spy on criminal suspects via their devices’ cameras and microphones. The legislation, which would apply to smartphones, connected cars, laptops, and other devices, was passed by the French National Assembly earlier this week as part of wider changes to the French justice system. In response to criticism, French president Emmanuel Macron’s party made changes to the law that would only allow it to be used “when justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime,” only for an appropriate duration, and only for a maximum of six months, regardless of the suspected criminal conduct. Both the right and left political parties of the country continue to protest the bill.

In recent years, American credit cards have been far harder to defraud, as banks have added security features like authentication chips. But EBT cards, the debit cards provided to many of the poorest Americans in the welfare system, have lagged behind in those protections, instead continuing to store their numbers in a simple magnetic strip. The result has been millions of dollars in irreversible theft from some of the country’s most needy and vulnerable families, as captured in a _Bloomberg BusinessWeek_ feature in this week’s “Heist Issue” of the magazine. California alone, according to the report, saw an average of $10 million a month stolen in the first three months of this year. The fraud scheme is carried out by criminals who plant “skimmer” devices on grocery store point-of-sale systems and ATMs that record credit card numbers, which are then used to drain accounts of funds as soon as they’re refreshed at midnight on the first of the month. _BusinessWeek_ tells the story of a mother of five whose welfare funds were stolen in this way four times in less than a year.

The Japanese port of Nagoya—the country’s biggest cargo port. handling roughly 10 percent of its total shipping—on Tuesday revealed that it had been the victim of a ransomware attack. The attack, apparently carried out by the prolific Russia-linked ransomware group LockBit, prevented companies like Toyota from loading and unloading manufacturing components from ships and led to a traffic jam of truck drivers picking up and offloading containers at the port. To the Nagoya shipping port’s credit, however, it recovered quickly from the attack, resuming operations just two days later.

Russia’s Notorious Troll Farm Disbands

Want to try out Meta’s new social media app? Here’s more context on what personal data is collected by Threads and similar social media apps.

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 introduced rate limits and an uptick in hate speech.

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, so the company’s attempt to recreate an online experience similar to Twitter is likely to attract plenty of normies, lurkers, and nomadic shitposters. Threads uses the AT Protocol developed by Bluesky, and Meta is working to incorporate Threads as part of the online Fediverse, a group of shared servers where users can interact across multiple platforms.

If you’re hesitant to share your personal data with a company on the receiving end of a billion dollar fine, that’s understandable. For those who are curious, however, here’s what we know about the service’s privacy policy, what data you hand over when you sign up, and how it compares to the data collected by other options.

Threads

Threads (Android, Apple) potentially collects a wide assortment of personal data that remains connected to you, based on the information available in Apple’s App Store, from your purchase history and physical address to your browsing history and health information. “Sensitive information” is also listed as a type of data collected by the Threads app. Some information this could include is your race, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, and religion as well as your biometric data.

Threads falls under the larger privacy policy covering Meta’s other social media platforms. Want to see the whole thing? You can read it for yourself here. There’s one caveat, though. The app has a supplemental privacy policy that’s also worth reading. A noteworthy detail from this document is that while you’re able to deactivate your Threads account whenever, you must delete your Instagram if you fully want to delete your Threads account.

Below is all the data collected by Threads that’s mentioned in the App Store. Do you have the Facebook or Instagram app on your phone? Keep in mind that this data collection by Meta is comparable to the data those apps collect about you.

For Android users, the Google Play Store doesn’t require you to hand over the same amount of extensive data to try out Threads. You have more control than Apple users, since you can granularly toggle what personal data is shared with apps.

Data Linked to You

**Third-Party Advertising:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Financial Info_ (Other Financial Info)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Gameplay Content, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Other Usage Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)
*   _Other Data_

**Developer's Advertising or Marketing:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Financial Info_ (Other Financial Info)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ ( Photos or Videos, Gameplay Content, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Other Usage Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)
*   _Other Data_

**Analytics:**

*   _Health & Fitness_ (Health, Fitness)
*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History, Financial Info, Payment Info, Other Financial Info)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
*   Contacts
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Audio Data, Gameplay Content, Customer Support, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Other Usage Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)
*   _Other Data_

**Product Personalization:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Financial Info_ (Other Financial Info)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
*   Contacts
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Gameplay Content, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Other Usage Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)
*   _Other Data_

**App Functionality:**

*   _Health & Fitness_ (Health, Fitness)
*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Financial Info_ (Payment Info, Credit Info, Other Financial Info)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages, Photos or Videos, Audio Data, Gameplay Content, Customer Support, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Other Usage Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)
*   _Other Data_

**Other Purposes:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Financial Info_ (Other Financial Info)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Gameplay Content, Customer Support, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Other Usage Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)
*   _Other Data_

Bluesky

Looking for an app that collects less personal data? Bluesky (Android, Apple) is a buzzy Twitter alternative started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and managed by CEO Jay Graber. Bluesky uses the AT Protocol that it created. Like Mastodon already does and Threads soon will, Bluesky incorporates the Fediverse servers as its backbone. The app is currently invite-only, but it does not currently collect anywhere near as much information as Threads or Twitter.

For Bluesky, the data that’s linked to you is focused on app functionality, like remembering your email and user ID, or access to photos and videos on your device so you can post memes. Here’s where you can find more info about Bluesky’s privacy policy. Keep in mind the service is still new and adding features, so there will likely be changes as it evolves.

Below is all the data collected by Bluesky that’s mentioned in the App Store. (Remember that this is only for iPhone owners. If you use an Android smartphone, you have more control over what data is shared.)

Data Linked to You

**App Functionality:**

*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address)
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Customer Support, Other User Content)
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID)

Data Not Linked to You

**Analytics:**

*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)

**App Functionality:**

*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)

Mastodon

What if you want a social media app that doesn’t suck up all your personal data? **Mastodon** (Android, Apple) might be a good option for you. Originally launched in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, Mastodon uses a decentralized protocol that’s different from Threads and Bluesky, called ActivityPub. It’s part of the Fediverse of shared servers. Mastodon is not exactly a new pick; it has positioned itself for years as an alternative to Twitter. (Remember, 2023 isn’t the first time users have considered ditching Twitter for something new and exciting.)

Are you trying it out for the first time? Here’s a great guide to getting started on Mastodon. There’s a bit of a learning curve with this one.

Below is all the data collected by Mastodon that’s mentioned in the App Store.

_\*In the style of Taylor Swift.\*_

\[Blank Space\]

That's right, the Mastodon app for iOS won't collect any data from your device. For Android owners, the app may share your name and email address with other companies.

If you don't like the official Mastodon apps for any reason, you can always try alternative apps with unique interfaces and features. Just be on the lookout for the privacy policies and data collection for those apps, since they don't have to commit to zero-data collection the way the official ones do.

Spill

Are you part of (or a fan of) Black Twitter and on the search for a new posting platform, preferably one that’s inclusive and voicey? Spill (Apple) is a Black-owned social media app that’s made with diverse communities in mind, specifically people of color. It was founded by Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and Devaris Brown, who both used to work at Twitter, and it launched earlier this year. Spill is not part of the Fediverse of shared servers.

Spill is currently invite-only, but you can sign up for the waiting list. While Spill does gather sensitive info, the other aspects of its data collection are not as extensive as Threads. Here’s the full privacy policy you can read over.

Below is all the data collected by Spill that’s mentioned in the App Store. It’s worth noting that Spill’s dev team is working on an Android app, but it’s not yet available to use.

Data Linked to You

**Developer's Advertising or Marketing:**

*   _Location_ (Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages, Photos or Videos, Audio Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_

**Analytics:**

*   _Location_ (Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages, Photos or Videos, Audio Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_

**Product Personalization:**

*   _Location_ (Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages, Photos or Videos, Audio Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_

**App Functionality:**

*   _Location_ (Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages, Photos or Videos, Audio Data)
*   _Sensitive Info_

**Other Purposes:**

*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Phone Number)

Hive Social

It’s a bit smaller than other platforms, but Hive Social (Android, Apple) is another contender for your attention span that’s particularly popular with gamers. This app is not part of the Fediverse. Nostalgic for the days when curated music would automatically play when a person visited your profile? This feature is one way Hive differentiates itself from Twitter, along with a built-in Q&A feature that lets your followers ask you questions (sometimes anonymously) that you can answer in posts to your feed. Want to give Hive a try? Check out our guide with tips for getting started.

The app collects information about you for functionality and analytics, but it’s not connected specifically to you. Learn more about what data the app uses by taking a look at its privacy policy.

Below is all the data collected by Hive Social that’s mentioned in the App Store for iPhone owners. (Have a Google Pixel or other Android device in your pocket? You can go into your privacy settings for more control over what data Hive collects.)

Data Not Linked to You

**Analytics:**

*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Customer Support, Other User Content)
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Other Usage Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)

**App Functionality:**

*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Customer Support, Other User Content)
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Other Usage Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)

What About Twitter?

It may seem like Threads collects a ton of personal data. (Because it does!) For more context, let’s go over what Twitter asks for as well. Twitter (Android, Apple) keeps plenty of data that’s linked to users and used to track you, like your purchase history and browsing history. With that in mind, the app does not list “sensitive information” as one of the disclosed categories of data collection. Check out its full privacy policy for an in-depth breakdown.

Below is all the data collected by Twitter that’s mentioned in the App Store. (Escaped from Apple’s walled garden? The Android app for Twitter still collects some personal data, like your precise location and web browsing history, unless you adjust your privacy settings.)

Data Used to Track You

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address)
*   _User Content_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data)

Data Linked to You

**Third-Party Advertising:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address)
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Performance Data)

**Developer's Advertising or Marketing:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address)
*   _User Content_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data)

**Analytics:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos, Audio Data, Other User Content)
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data)

**Product Personalization:**

*   _Purchases_ (Purchase History)
*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Phone Number)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_
*   _Search History_
*   _Browsing History_
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID, Device ID)
*   _Usage Data_ (Product Interaction, Advertising Data)
*   _Diagnostics_ (Crash Data, Performance Data, Other Diagnostic Data)

**Other Purposes:**

*   _Location_ (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
*   _Contact Info_ (Email Address, Name, Phone Number)
*   _Contacts_
*   _User Content_ (Photos or Videos)
*   Search History
*   _Identifiers_ (User ID)

Data Not Linked to You

**Third-Party Advertising:**

*   _Other Data_

**Developer's Advertising or Marketing:**

*   _Other Data_

**Analytics:**

*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages)
*   _Other Data_

**App Functionality:**

*   _Contact Info_ (Physical Address)
*   _User Content_ (Emails or Text Messages)
*   _Other Data_

How Threads' Privacy Policy Compares to Twitter's (and Its Rivals')

Meta’s Twitter alternative promises that it will work with decentralized platforms, giving you greater control of your data. You can hold the company to that—if you don't sign up.

As Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, started generating buzz ahead of yesterday’s launch, curious netizens spotted a placeholder listing for the app in Apple’s App Store. Like all iOS apps, the listing included details about the user data the app is designed to collect and track. And observers couldn’t help but notice that this brand-new app was already listing a whopping 14 categories of data that “may be collected and linked to your identity.” 

It might be a jarring reminder, but this is par for the course with Meta-owned apps, which the company monetizes by selling targeted ads and personalized marketing. Facebook and Instagram’s iOS apps list even more categories than Threads, the Messenger app lists about as many, and even the secure messaging app WhatsApp discloses nine categories of “Data Linked to You.” So for people fed up with Twitter’s rapidly deteriorating platform (and vibes), a Meta-owned alternative—with its predictability and relative stability—could even potentially appeal to those who are generally concerned about data privacy. 

Early data suggests as much: Threads, which is directly linked to users’ Instagram accounts, saw 10 million sign-ups in its first seven hours, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Ultimately, Meta’s pitch for Threads is simply that it’s the devil you know.

But one thing is different this time: Meta is dangling an opportunity to essentially be on Threads without signing up for the platform at all. The company announced yesterday that it is planning to make Threads interoperable with other, non-Meta social networks that support a decentralized protocol already used by WordPress and 2022’s decentralization poster child, Mastodon. This means that if Meta follows through, you’ll be able to see and interact with Threads content from other platforms and services that support the standard, which is known as ActivityPub.

Meta says that Threads will start supporting ActivityPub “soon,” a descriptor that doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence. The company has already spent years, for example, working on its longtime promise of default end-to-end encryption on Messenger. But incorporating decentralization into Threads, and specifically supporting ActivityPub, has reportedly been a core aspect of Meta’s vision for the app from the beginning. Meta has also already sketched out details of the plan in its supplemental privacy policy for Threads.

All of this means that if you’re sick of Meta’s data-gobbling ways, or you don’t already have an Instagram account and don’t want to get one, you actually have some leverage: Don’t join Threads. Use Mastodon or another ActivityPub platform until Threads comes to you. Or hang out on Bluesky, which doesn’t support ActivityPub but is working on its own vision of a decentralized, portable social network.

“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services," Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko wrote in a blog post ahead of yesterday’s Threads launch.

Easy examples of decentralized services you already intuitively understand are phones and email. You can call anyone on any number, even if you and the person you’re calling buy phone service from different companies. Same with email. Even if pretty much everyone you know uses Gmail, there’s nothing materially different about emailing with the Yahoo and Hotmail holdouts in your life. And maybe your friend Jane runs her own email server and her address is jane@janerox.com. Love that for you, Jane—doesn’t change anything for anyone else.

That’s it. That’s how “the fediverse,” or federated services, work too. You join a server, and you’re trusting that server with your data. But then you can communicate with all the other servers running the same protocol, and the only data everyone on all those other servers can see from you is the content you choose to put out there. So Gmail has all of your emails and usage history, and Jane has all of her own emails and usage history, but the only data she has about you on her server is the emails you’ve sent her. And the only data Gmail has about Jane comes from her interactions with you and any other Gmail users.

Decentralization doesn’t change the basic functions of a social network, and that’s fine. The whole point of these services is to be a platform for publicly posting and consuming information. They aren’t designed around implementing end-to-end encryption. The servers still have access to user data and can be subpoenaed by governments or hacked. But decentralization creates a model through which users can elect to entrust their information to servers based on which ones have less-predatory data practices.

Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of their users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who their users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.

“I am perhaps equal parts excited and apprehensive to see how things play out with Threads, but it is really underlining the beauty of the fediverse that you have every option and the opportunity to choose,” Schulman says. “If you like Meta and you want to be in there, great. Go join Threads, you’ll be happy there, and you’ll also have access to everything else. If you don’t want to be a part of Meta, but you’ve got friends or family that do or public figures or whatever, then fine. You can get an account on any number of other fediverse servers and then follow the people that you want. Or if you want nothing to do at all with Meta, then there are plenty of servers out there \[that\] have already announced that they're preemptively blocking Threads. So you can live that life, too.”

No matter who you throw your lot in with, an important concept is that the server you choose is still going to have access to your data, even though all the other servers don’t. If Threads implements ActivityPub and you use it to interact with the fediverse, you’re choosing Meta as your server and everything that comes with that. If you run your own server, like Jane, you can retain full control. But if you’re somewhere in the middle and use a server run by someone else, you need to keep an eye out for future changes. Mastodon is currently a crowdfunded platform, but it’s largely unclear what the business model will be for decentralized services like Bluesky. And future pivots could mean that your server eventually implements more user-monitoring or data-tracking practices. Then it might be time to move on—a process made easier by the portability that's built into the fediverse, allowing you to switch servers while maintaining your connections.

If you’re a Twitter user, or used to be, you have already dealt with a service that makes dramatic changes and completely upends your expectations and trust. But the Twitter case study illustrates a crucial idea. From a data privacy perspective, the worst-case scenario is no worse in the world of decentralization, the best-case scenario is much better, and, for once, you get a say in where you end up.

Don't Join Threads—Make Instagram's 'Twitter Killer' Join You

The National Defense Authorization Act may include new language forbidding government entities from buying Americans' search histories, location data, and more.

A “must-pass” defense bill wending its way through the United States House of Representatives may be amended to abolish the government practice of buying information on Americans that the country’s highest court has said police need a warrant to seize. Though it’s far too early to assess the odds of the legislation surviving the coming months of debate, it’s currently one of the relatively few amendments to garner support from both Republican and Democratic members. 

Introduction of the amendment follows a report declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—the nation’s top spy—which last month revealed that intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been buying up data on Americans that the government’s own experts described as “the same type” of information the US Supreme Court in 2018 sought to shield against warrantless searches and seizures. 

A handful of House lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have declared support for the amendment submitted late last week by representatives Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, and Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat. The bipartisan duo is seeking stronger warrant requirements for the surveillant data constantly accumulated by people’s cellphones. They argue that it shouldn’t matter whether a company is willing to accept payment from the government in lieu of a judge’s permission.

“Warrantless mass surveillance infringes the Constitutionally protected right to privacy,” says Davidson. The amendment, he says, is aimed chiefly at preventing the government from “circumventing the Fourth Amendment” by purchasing “your location data, browsing history, or what you look at online.”

A copy of the Davidson-Jacobs amendment reviewed by WIRED shows that the warrant requirements it aims to bolster focus specifically on people’s web browsing and internet search history, along with GPS coordinates and other location information derived primarily from cellphones. It further encapsulates “Fourth Amendment protected information” and would bar law enforcement agencies of all levels of jurisdiction from exchanging “anything of value” for information about people that would typically require a “warrant, court order, or subpoena under law.”

The amendment contains an exception for anonymous information that it describes as “reasonably” immune to being de-anonymized; a legal term of art that would defer to a court’s analysis of a case’s more fluid technicalities. A judge might, for instance, find it unreasonable to assume a data set is well obscured based simply on the word of a data broker. The Federal Trade Commission’s Privacy and Identity Protection Division noted last year that claims that data is anonymized “are often deceptive,” adding that “significant research” reflects how trivial it often is to reidentify “anonymized data.”

The amendment was introduced Friday to defense legislation that will ultimately authorize a range of policies and programs consuming much of the Pentagon’s nearly $890 billion budget next year. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Congress is required to pass annually, is typically pieced together from hundreds, if not thousands, of amendments. 

This year negotiations are particularly contentious, given the split chamber and a mess of interparty strife, and only one in six NDAA amendments introduced so far have apparent bipartisan support. 

Republican members Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, and Ben Cline of Virginia have backed the Davidson-Jacobs amendment, according to the House Rules Committee website. They’re joined by Democrats Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Zoe Lofgren of California, and Veronica Escobar of Texas.

Jacobs previously coauthored a related amendment with Davidson that attempted to compel the US military to disclose annually how often its various spy agencies purchase Americans’ smartphone and web-browsing data. The amendment was stripped from the final version of last year’s NDAA.

The data broker report declassified last month by the US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, stressed that neither presently, nor at any point in the past, would the government be permitted to force “billions of people to carry location-tracking devices on their persons at all times.” That is, nevertheless, what is happening today, independent of the government’s actions. The unceasing explosions of new technologies are clashing more and more frequently with the nation’s antiquated privacy laws, giving the Department of Homeland Security, Defense Intelligence Agency, and others like them an unmistakable loophole through which virtually anyone can be surveilled without a reason. 

Demand Progress senior policy counsel Sean Vitka, whose group has spent years lobbying for privacy reform in the face of the government’s growing and often secret reliance on data brokers, says the relatively untracked purchases—up to and including “turnkey lists of everyone who has gone to an abortion clinic, a place of worship, a rehab facility, or a protest”—represent an “existential threat” to the right to privacy. The Davidson-Jacobs amendment marks a “critical opportunity to get \[federal lawmakers\] on the record,” adds Vitka.

The American Civil Liberties Union intends to score how lawmakers vote on the amendment, WIRED has learned. The lawmakers’ effort is also being supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, FreedomWorks, and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, among dozens of similar civil society organizations.  

Congressional staffers and others privy to ongoing conferencing over privacy matters on Capitol Hill say that regardless of whether the amendment succeeds, the focus on data brokers is just a prelude to a bigger fight coming this fall over the potential sunsetting of one of the spy community’s powerful tools, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the survivability of which is anything but assured.

US Spies Are Buying Americans' Private Data. Congress Has a Chance to Stop It

Vulnerabilities in electric vehicle charging stations and a lack of broad standards threaten drivers—and the power grid.

_This story was co-published with_ _Grist__, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions._

With his electric Kia EV6 running low on power, Sky Malcolm pulled into a bank of fast-chargers near Terre Haute, Indiana, to plug in. As his car powered up, he peeked at nearby chargers. One in particular stood out.

Instead of the businesslike welcome screen displayed on the other Electrify America units, this one featured a picture of President Biden pointing his finger, with an “I did that!” caption. It was the same meme the president’s critics started slapping on gas pumps as prices soared last year, cloned 20 times across the screen.

"It was, unfortunately, not terribly surprising,” Malcolm says of the hack, which he stumbled upon last fall. Such shenanigans are increasingly common. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, hackers tweaked charging stations along the Moscow–Saint Petersburg motorway in Russia to greet users with anti-Putin messages. Around the same time, cyber-vandals in England programmed public chargers to broadcast pornography. Just this year, the hosts of YouTube channel The Kilowatts tweeted a video showing it was possible to take control of an Electrify America station’s operating system.

While such breaches have so far remained relatively innocuous, cybersecurity experts say the consequences would be far more severe at the hands of truly nefarious miscreants. As companies, governments, and consumers sprint to install more chargers, the risks could only grow.

In recent years, security researchers and white-hat hackers have identified sprawling vulnerabilities in internet-connected home and public charging hardware that could expose customer data, compromise Wi-Fi networks, and, in a worst-case scenario, bring down power grids. Given the dangers, everyone from device manufacturers to the Biden administration is rushing to fortify these increasingly common machines and establish security standards.

“This is a major problem,” says Jay Johnson, a cybersecurity researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. “It is potentially a very catastrophic situation for this country if we don't get this right.”

Vulnerabilities in EV charger security aren’t hard to find. Johnson and his colleagues summarized known shortcomings in a paper published last fall in the journal _Energies_. They found everything from the possibility of hackers being able to track users to vulnerabilities that “may expose home and corporate \[Wi-Fi\] networks to a breach.” Another study, led by Concordia University and published last year in the journal _Computers & Security_, highlighted more than a dozen classes of “severe vulnerabilities,” including the ability to turn chargers on and off remotely, as well as deploy malware.

When British security research firm Pen Test Partners spent 18 months analyzing seven popular EV charger models, it found five had critical flaws. For instance, it identified a software bug in the popular Chargepoint network that hackers could likely exploit to obtain sensitive user information (the team stopped digging before acquiring such data). A charger sold in the UK by Project EV allowed researchers to overwrite its firmware.

Such cracks could conceivably permit hackers to access vehicle data or consumers’ credit card information, says Ken Munro, a cofounder of Pen Test Partners. But perhaps the most worrying weakness to him was that, as with the Concordia testing, his team discovered that many of the devices allowed hackers to stop or start charging at will. That could leave frustrated drivers without a full battery when they need one, but it’s the cumulative impacts that could be truly devastating.

“It’s not about your charger, it’s about everyone’s charger at the same time,” he says. Many home users leave their cars connected to chargers even if they aren’t drawing power. They might, for example, plug in after work and schedule the vehicle to charge overnight when prices are lower. If a hacker were to switch thousands, or millions, of chargers on or off simultaneously, it could destabilize and even bring down entire electricity networks. 

“We’ve inadvertently created a weapon that nation-states can use against our power grid,” says Munro. The United States glimpsed what such an attack might look like in 2021 when hackers hijacked Colonial Pipeline and disrupted gasoline supplies nationwide. The attack ended once the company paid millions of dollars in ransom.

Munro’s top recommendation for consumers is to not connect their home chargers to the internet, which should prevent the exploitation of most vulnerabilities. The bulk of safeguards, however, must come from manufacturers.

“It's the responsibility of the companies offering these services to make sure they are secure,” says Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. “To some degree, you have to trust the device you're plugging into.”

Electrify America declined an interview request. With regard to the issues Malcolm and the Kilowatts documented, spokesperson Octavio Navarro wrote in an email that the incidents were isolated and the fixes were quickly deployed. In a statement, the company said, “Electrify America is constantly monitoring and reinforcing measures to protect ourselves and our customers and focusing on risk-mitigating station and network design.”

Pen Test Partners wrote in its findings that companies were by and large responsive to fixing the vulnerabilities it identified, with ChargePoint and others plugging gaps in less than 24 hours (though one company created a new hole while trying to patch the old one). Project EV did not respond to Pen Test Partners but did eventually implement “strong authentication and authorization.” Experts, however, argue that it’s far past time for the industry to move beyond this whack-a-mole approach to cybersecurity.

“Everybody knows this is an issue and lots of people are trying to figure out how to best solve it,” says Johnson, adding that he has seen progress. For example, many public charging stations have upgraded to more secure methods of transmitting data. But as for a coordinated set of standards, he says, “there's not much regulation out there.”

There has been some movement toward changing that. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included some $7.5 billion to expand the electric vehicle charging network across the US, and the Biden administration has made cybersecurity part of that initiative. Last fall, the White House convened manufacturers and policymakers to discuss a path toward ensuring that increasingly vital electric vehicle charging hardware is properly protected.

“Our critical infrastructure needs to meet a baseline level of security and resilience,” says Harry Krejsa, chief strategist at the White House Office of the National Cyber Director. He also argued that bolstering EV cybersecurity is as much about building trust as it is mitigating risk. Secure systems, he says, “give us the confidence in our next-generation digital foundations to aim higher than we possibly could have otherwise.”

Earlier this year, the Federal Highway Administration finalized a rule requiring states to implement “appropriate” cybersecurity strategies for chargers funded under the infrastructure law. But Johnson says the regulation omits devices installed outside that expansion, not to mention the more than 100,000 units already in place nationwide. Plus, he says, states haven’t offered much detail about what they’ll do. “If you drill down into the state plans, you'll find that they are actually extremely light on cyber requirements,” he says. “The vast majority that I saw just say they will follow best practices.”

Just what constitutes best practice remains ill-defined. Johnson and his colleagues at Sandia published recommendations for charger manufacturers, and he noted that the National Institute of Standards and Technology is developing a framework for fast-charging that could help shape future regulation. But, ultimately, he would like to see something akin to the 2022 Protecting and Transforming Cyber Health Care Act that’s geared toward electric vehicles.

“Regulation is a way to drive the entire industry to improve their baseline security standards,” he says, pointing to recent laws in other countries as models or starting points for policymakers in the United States. Last year, for instance, the United Kingdom rolled out a host of requirements for EV chargers, such as enhanced encryption and authentication standards, tamper detection alerts, and randomized delay functionality.

The latter means that a charger must be able to turn on and off with a random time delay of up to 10 minutes. That would mitigate the impact of all the chargers in an area coming online simultaneously after a power outage or hack. “You don’t get that spike, which is great,” says Munro. “It removes the threat from the power grid.”

Johnson is optimistic that the industry is moving in the right direction, albeit more slowly than is ideal. “I can't imagine \[stricter standards\] won't happen. It's just taking a long time,” he says. And he certainly doesn’t want to spark undue alarm, but rather apply steady pressure for improvement.

“It's scary stuff,” he says, “but it shouldn't be fear-mongering.”

EV Charger Hacking Poses a ‘Catastrophic’ Risk

Plus: Hackers knock out Russian military satellite communications, a spyware maker gets breached, and the SEC targets a victim company's CISO.

Amid exploding AI usage, the United States Senate is mulling legislation to regulate the development of artificial intelligence, but lawmakers' comments to WIRED this week indicate that Congress' abysmal track record on tech regulation may be doomed to repeat itself. Meanwhile, in the European Union, challenges filed under the EU's GDPR data law on Thursday allege that Pornhub has been collecting user data illegally.

We looked at a common air travel booking scam that can turn real—but not ticketed—flight reservations into cash grabs for cybercriminals. And tech companies have recently released an array of critical software updates that you should install on your devices right now. Some patches published in recent weeks from the company Progress Software patch flaws in the popular file transfer service MOVEit, which has been exploited by ransomware actors to spread malware and steal data from international companies, universities, and the US government.

If you want a digital hygiene project for the weekend, we have tips on how to make your chats and messaging more secure. And if you're craving a long read, WIRED went in-depth on the 1973 US National Personnel Records Center fire that destroyed 17 million military records and prompted a massive restoration effort.

And there's more. Each week, we round up the stories we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

On Tuesday, a 7-2 decision by the US Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a man who repeatedly threatened a stranger online. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion that First Amendment free speech protections require such cases to show that online harassers or cyberstalkers were aware that their digital abuse could be construed as threatening. Threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment, but the court said prosecutors must show that a defendant “consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.” The offender in the case the court looked at, Billy Counterman of Colorado, had “moved to dismiss the charge on First Amendment grounds, arguing that his messages were not ‘true threats’ and therefore could not form the basis of a criminal prosecution.”

Counterman had persistently and repeatedly messaged a local singer he didn't know on Facebook over two years, and when she would block him he made new accounts to continue messaging her. Victims of online harassment and digital rights advocates warned following the decision that it creates a dangerous precedent to empower cyberstalkers. “The Court just handed stalkers and harassers, including of politicians, journalists, climate scientists, doctors advocating for vaccines, you name it, a new weapon,” Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project, told the _Washington Post_.

A cyberattack caused a multiday outage this week of a Russian satellite communication system from Dozor-Teleport. The platform is broadly used, including by the Russian military. Ukrainian satellite communication infrastructure suffered a similar outage more than a year ago. Dozor’s parent company, Amtel Svyaz, also grappled with significant system outages this week. Multiple hackers claimed responsibility for the attacks, including some purporting to be hacktivists and others who said they were affiliated with the Russian private mercenary army Wagner Group. In addition to the outage, one of the entities claiming responsibility for the attack said it had stolen data from Dozor and published 700 files, including documents and images, to a leak site and Telegram.

The invasive phone monitoring app LetMeSpy said on June 21 that it was itself hacked. Attackers stole names, messages, call logs, and location data collected by the service, the company said. LetMeSpy is a Polish Android app that's used around the world to monitor thousands of people. The company's notice said that “a security incident occurred involving obtaining unauthorized access to the data of website users​​.”

Years after a Russian espionage campaign launched a devastating supply chain attack against software firm SolarWinds, the US Securities and Exchange Commission sent legal notices—known as “Wells notices”—to certain current and former Solarwinds employees. Such notices warn of potential securities law violations that could lead to civil enforcement action, but they rarely relate to cybersecurity incidents. Notably, one of the SolarWinds employees who received a notice is the company's current chief information security officer, Tim Brown, who was Solarwinds' head of security architecture at the time of the attack. Company CFO Barton Kalsu also received a notice. The situation is potentially significant as the US and other countries attempt to develop appropriate accountability mechanisms for high-ranking executives who preside over breaches and other security lapses. The fear among security professionals is often that individual penalties will simply discourage talented practitioners from taking top roles.

Source

Wired