By Monday, rumors were circulating on Reddit and across social media that the mass disemboweling of Parler's data had been carried out by exploiting a security vulnerability in the site's two-factor authentication that allowed hackers to create "millions of accounts" with administrator privileges.

A WIRED reader sent a note to my tip line: The body of a hiker had been found in a tent in Florida in the summer of 2018, but scores of amateur detectives, and a few professional ones too, couldn’t figure out who he was.

“This model opens up a lot of possibilities, and it creates a dynamic where workers can leverage their power through an organization,” says Wes McEnany, the East Coast lead for CWA’s Campaign to Organize Digital Employees.

On Monday morning Kaspersky published new evidence of technical similarities between malware used by the mysterious SolarWinds hackers, known by security industry names including UNC2452 and Dark Halo, and the well-known hacker group Turla, believed to be Russian in origin and also known by the names Venomous Bear and Snake.

DDoSecrets' cofounder Emma Best argues that the trail of dumped data that ransomware operations leave in their wake often contains information that deserves to be scrutinized and, in some cases, revealed to the public.

“I can tap on the picture of Annan (what she calls Thanaraj) and send him an audio message,” she says.“The phone connects her directly to the people who can help her,” says Thanaraj.

Hacking groups within Russia's GRU military intelligence agency like Fancy Bear and Sandworm didn't cause the sort of mayhem this year that they did in the last decade—or the electoral sabotage that the security community feared as November approached.

There will be more news to come about the SolarWinds supply chain attack and possible other elements of the extensive campaign, but in the meantime officials, security practitioners, and researchers are all puzzling over questions of where to draw the line on global espionage and how to deter destructive and otherwise unacceptable hacking.

But tightly packed in-person gatherings are likely to be among the last types of events that resume once the pandemic ends, which means that conference organizers will hang on to many of the virtual elements that were very much their Plan B.

To put two Nest speakers together as a stereo pair, they need to be in the same room: Tap any speaker, then the cog icon, then Room to set this.David Nield via GoogleWith that done, tap on the first speaker, then the cog icon, then Speaker pair .

Many experts were looking to Saturday’s Million MAGA March as a kind of violence-and-extremism barometer, but, much like the election itself, it wasn’t decisive enough to be entirely comforting.“Trump was just kind of a golden goose,” says Shannon Reid, who researches street gangs and white power at UNC Charlotte.

In this week’s episode of the Get WIRED podcast, senior editor Angela Watercutter talks to Jones and Angelini about the journey they went on with the creator of Pepe—and what the little green frog means now.

I’m easily distracted by noise from multiple directions and because I was in Mexico to work on a book, stepping away from the noise of constant connectivity felt like freedom.

Long before any results came in, the protocol for this trial calculated what sort of data—including how many people ended up getting sick—would need to be tallied in order to know that the vaccine had cleared the minimum requirement of 50-percent effectiveness set by the Food and Drug Administration.

In both goldfish and the carp they were derived from, there are 25 chromosomes, but each fish carries 100 of them—instead of two copies, they have four, or rather two sets of two.

We took a closer look at Berserk Bear, the Russian hacking group that for years has broken into critical US infrastructure targets—and more recently, election-adjacent systems—without ever actually causing serious mayhem.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an advisory warning that a group known as Berserk Bear—or alternately Energetic Bear, TEMP.Isotope, and Dragonfly—had carried out a broad hacking campaign against US state, local, territorial, and tribal government agencies, as well aviation sector targets.

Earlier this week, Dutch security researcher Victor Gevers told De Volkskrant that he had recently accessed Donald Trump's Twitter account simply by guessing the password: maga2020!A few days later, he says, he saw that Trump's Twitter account had added two-factor authentication, freezing him out.

The more important question to ask when a major company like Barnes and Noble gets hacked—which it did, according to an email sent to customers this week—is how much the hackers actually got away with.

A giant white school bus known as Big Bertha puttered into a two-stoplight town far north on the Olympic Peninsula, in desperate need of a new battery, on the very day the town was on alert for a different bus, one full of violent antifa activists ready to riot.

A recently released tool is letting anyone exploit an unusual Mac vulnerability to bypass Apple's trusted T2 security chip and gain deep system access.

Windows XP Source Code Leaks OnlineWindows XP's refusal to die has caused a multitude of security problems ; Microsoft stopped officially providing updates to the operating system in 2014, meaning any vulnerabilities largely don't get fixed on the millions of computers that still run it.

Here's everything you need to know about what humans can do to stop wrecking the planet.“This is really significant, because it sends a clear signal about where California is going in terms of its vehicle fleet,” says Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley.

However, according to John Naslund, who studies digital mental health at Harvard Medical School, the Covid-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented surge in online activity.It’s interesting that they’re not considered essential.” In his research into online groups dedicated to mental health issues, he’s found such communities to be incredibly helpful for some people’s wellbeing.

What was not at at all normal: The group was launching an international network to detect pathogens that can jump from wildlife to the human population, a field of inquiry that’s become politicized since the coronavirus pandemic began—and they were doing it with federal money, even though the United States government has been the source of the politicization.

At one point John Mills and his wife, Erica, were members at three different gyms, where John could lift weights and Erica could take indoor cycling classes.Mills quickly figured out how to cast Peloton classes from the bike’s tablet to the playroom’s giant projector screen, using a native Android streaming option.

However, it’s worth stressing that the content of the messages you send isn’t shared, as Facebook doesn’t have access to them due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption .WhatsApp collects more information about you than it shares with Facebook.

Google recently introduced a new feature called Tab Groups that makes it easier to manage different bunches of tabs in Chrome.

But next year, they plan to take soil exposed to decomposing human bodies and apply it to plants in a greenhouse to see whether it changes the appearance of their leaves.

Last week’s episode of the Get WIRED podcast introduced listeners to Direct Action Everywhere—one of the most radical animal-rights organizations around—and the group’s leader, Wayne Hsiung.Sign up for our Podcasts newsletter and never miss an episode of Get WIRED, Gadget Lab, and Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.