USA Yesterday the Supreme Court annulled Roe v. Wadethe monumental decision of 1973 guaranteed the right to abortion in the US for 49 years and, as Maryn McKenna write for WIRED, “Revolutionary Life for Women.” Now, all of that is in jeopardy.
The profound consequences of the court’s decision cannot be overstated. Outside the life–and–death hazardous now faced with pregnant people, the end of Roe and the rise of criminalized abortion could open a private nightmare which civil liberties support warned for decades.
As we reported in May after a draft Supreme Court decision was leaked to Politico, the criminalization of abortion in states across the US requires people to adopt a comprehensive digital security strategy to protect yourself from surveillance. This may include steps such as switch to an end-to-end encrypted app like Signalrestrict your data traces by using Search engines like DuckDuckGo instead of Google, lock your privacy settings on your phoneand use browser extensions to block web trackers. For more details on ensuring your digital privacy, we recommend the instructions from Digital Defense Fund and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
If you are going to challenge the Supreme Court’s decision, see our guide on how to protest safely. And if you’re looking for information on getting the following abortion-Roe America, we have a list of resources for that as well.
In this week’s other stories, we’ve explained how to password protect any file and dive in persistent security risks associated with Microsoft’s now-defunct Internet Explorer Browser. We have reviewed Brave’s New Goggles Tool for a privacy-focused search engine, allowing you to create custom search filters. We have discovered ways that The US intelligence community is using artificial intelligence. And we have detailed a new type of spyware that Google and Lookout researchers say has been used to target people in multiple countries.
But that’s not all. We’ve compiled here the big security news from the past week that we couldn’t cover. Click on the title to read the full story. And it’s safe out there.
Microsoft this week released a report dive into Russia’s cyber efforts in its ongoing war against Ukraine. The researchers found that Russia carried out at least 48 attacks against Ukrainian entities. While some attempts have been successful, the researchers found that rapidly deployed digital defenses resisted many of these attacks, including the failed attempt by the Russian military. to deploy “wipe” malware against Ukrainian government computers. However, Vladimir Putin does not restrict Russian hackers from targeting targets in Ukraine. Microsoft researchers identified Russian “cyber intrusion attempts” against 128 organizations in 42 countries outside of Ukraine. Moscow regularly targets governments of NATO countries, and researchers say that Russian attacks were successful 29% of the time. In a quarter of successful attacks, Russian hackers stole internal data from the victim’s network. Microsoft also warned that Russia is carrying out “cyber-influence operations” globally, at least some of which have stepped up propaganda to encourage people not to get the Covid-19 vaccine.
Although political misinformation still pervades Meta’s platforms ahead of the November midterm elections, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is said to have turned his attention away from issues related to election to focus on reverse. According to many sources who spoke with The New York Times, “Facebook’s core election team… has been fragmented, and now there are only 60 people focused full-time on issues of election integrity. Company spokesman Tom Reynolds countered that number, saying that “hundreds” of people at Meta are focused on election-related work.
Another day, another crypto company attack hit the criminals net with a staggering amount of money. The latest known attack, against California-based Web3 company, Harmony, targets a blockchain bridge, an application used to transfer cryptocurrencies from one blockchain to another. The company said hackers stole about $100 million in digital assets. Demand is a known weakness in the crypto ecosystem. At the end of March, hackers believed to be part of the Lazarus Group of Korea earned $540 million worth of crypto thanks to a bridge attack.
We’ve all been there: On your way home from a drunken night on the town, you realize you’ve misplaced a USB drive containing everyone’s names, addresses, birthdates, and tax-related information in the city. your street. Never happened to you? Well, a contractor in Amagasaki, Japan, wasn’t so lucky. Guardians reported that the unnamed contractor lost a USB drive containing the sensitive personal data of all 460,000 Amagasaki residents after a night of drinking at a restaurant. While the mistake is certainly embarrassing, hopefully it won’t lead to a privacy breach: According to city officials, the data was encrypted, and they found no evidence of a leak. Congratulations!
