Digital Security Articles & Newsletters

Apple has released numerous security and privacy features over the past few years. If you use iCloud, you’ll want to enable Advanced Data Protection.

The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov has helped foster the mistaken notion that the app is a standard end-to-end encrypted messenger.

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FPF's digital security advice column today answers, what are your top three security tips?

National Public Data confirmed nearly 3 billion records were affected.

Protecting sources from harm should be the top priority of any newsroom. Whistleblowers risk identification when sending confidential files over mainstream email and messaging services. Although there are many secure file-sharing applications, they vary in cost and technical expertise.OnionShare, a free file-sharing application, makes it easy to send and …

The latest move means that the app has been removed from Google Play and Apple App Store in Russia.

The Spamhaus Project has released a blog criticizing Cloudflare — a content delivery network and cloud cybersecurity provider — for providing security services to abusive domains. These websites could contain spam, phishing links, malware, and even botnets.

No matter what happens this November, spying on members of the news media may be an ongoing problem

The cybersecurity firm Kaspersky disclosed that at least five Google Play applications contained Mandrake, a sophisticated cyberespionage tool.

Google has a habit of hitting the brakes on products and features — so much so that it’s become something of a meme to be “killed by Google.” This time it decided to backtrack on its long-standing plan to replace traditional tracking in its Chrome browser.

Last Friday, computer systems worldwide were taken down by a defective update from enterprise cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike. In the wake of the outage, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency is warning of phishing emails, with attackers posing as CrowdStrike customer support.

Most note-taking applications have limited security and privacy features. Here are some alternatives you could adopt for your newsroom.

Around 110 million AT&T subscribers were affected by a data breach from May 1 to Oct. 31, 2022, TechCrunch reported.

We can learn a lot about how to get ahead of these problems.

The parent company for Authy, an application for two-factor authentication, has issued a critical security update to its Android and iOS users. According to BleepingComputer, hackers utilized leaked phone numbers from past data breaches to identify up to 33 million Authy users.

Apple released a firmware update patching a critical Bluetooth vulnerability in AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Fit Pro. According to its support page, an adversary in Bluetooth range could spoof as an intended source device for these wireless headphones. When the targeted headphones send a connection request to the spoofed device, it could eavesdrop on confidential conversations.

According to data unearthed in a congressional probe, more than 60,000 requests by federal investigators and police captured data on 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023.

We often talk to newsrooms about dealing with data brokers — companies that aggregate and sell data from commercial and public records. According to recent reporting from TechCrunch, an alleged breach of a U.S. data broker impacted at least 300 million people. Their reporting suggests “mixed results” verifying the authenticity of the data.

In the hope of simplifying how customers can log into apps and websites, Apple has announced it will offer a new Passwords app in its upcoming versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15.

Data breach notification service “Have I Been Pwned?” has added the login information associated with 361 million email addresses. Have I Been Pwned owner Troy Hunt says as many as 151 million of these unique email addresses have never been seen in his database before. The website boasts tracking over 13.5 billion breach accounts. Some of these credentials are reportedly harvested from users’ devices infected with information-stealing malware.

Over this past week, Slack published a blog post defending its privacy practices following widespread criticism over its use of customer data to train its global AI models. At the moment, organizations are required to opt out to prevent their messages, content, and files from being mined to develop Slack’s AI.

Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green explains that “the cryptography behind Signal (also used in WhatsApp and several other messengers) is open source and has been intensively reviewed by cryptographers. When it comes to cryptography, this is pretty much the gold standard.” By comparison, Telegram does not provide end-to-end encryption protection by default and only offers it as an option in one-on-one “Secret Chat” mode.

While it’s powerful and convenient, Google Docs might not be right for all documents, including those that you consider sensitive, private, or that you can’t risk losing. Read more about newsroom privacy and security considerations when using Google Workspace.

According to its security blog, Google prevented 2.28 million — yes, million — Android apps from being published on its Play Store in 2023. The company says it also removed 333,000 accounts for attempting to deliver malware through the Play Store, as well as for “repeated severe policy violations.” These numbers have grown substantially since 2022, when the company disclosed it prevented 1.43 million apps from being published on the Play Store.