A year after a billion-dollar seizure of the dark web market's crypto, the same agency found a giant trove hidden under a different hacker's floorboards.

The legendary dark-web market for drugs known as the Silk Road was designed to be an anarchic underworld economy that evaded all government control. Instead, years after it was torn offline, it's proven to be the IRS’s gift that keeps on giving.

On Monday, the US Department of Justice announced that a Georgia man named James Zhong has pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road. As part of his plea agreement, Zhong has forfeited that massive stash of bitcoins to the DOJ—a sum that, at the time of the coins' seizure in late 2021, would have been the biggest-ever Justice Department seizure not only of cryptocurrency but of currency of any kind. The bitcoins were ultimately found stored on what’s described in court records as a “single-board computer” hidden in a popcorn can, along with more than $600,000 in cash and precious metals, all held in a safe under the floorboards of a bathroom closet in Zhong’s home.

The newly revealed case represents yet another notch in the belt for IRS Criminal Investigations, or IRS-CI, which over the past several years has used—very often in partnership with blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis—cryptocurrency tracing techniques that have led to record-breaking troves of ill-gotten bitcoins and to the alleged hackers and money launderers who amassed them. In fact, Zhong is the _second_ Silk Road hacker to turn over a billion-dollar cache of coins to the IRS-CI, after another unnamed individual agreed the previous year to forfeit nearly 70,000 bitcoins he'd stolen from the drug market—a record-breaking, even larger collection of coins that was worth $1 billion at Bitcoin's lower exchange rate at the time. Both those records were again broken earlier this year by IRS-CI's case against two alleged money launderers in New York accused of pocketing $4.5 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from the Bitfinex exchange.

"Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds," wrote US Attorney Damian Williams, a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, in a statement about the latest indictment and 10-figure seizure. "This case shows that we won’t stop following the money, no matter how expertly hidden, even to a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin.”

The hidden safe where investigators found a popcorn tin containing a storage device with Zhong’s $3.36 billion in Bitcoin.

Photograph: Department of Justice

According to an IRS-CI affidavit detailing Zhong's theft of the 50,000-plus bitcoins from the Silk Road, he appears to have found a vulnerability in that dark-web market that in 2012 allowed him to somehow pull more coins out of accounts he created there than he had deposited. The affidavit describes how he registered a succession of accounts on the site with names like "thetormentor" and "dubba," deposited a sum of coins into the Bitcoin wallets for each account, and then made repeated withdrawals of the entire sums held there within a single second to multiply his money several times over. This apparently exploited a bug in the Silk Road that allowed those rapid-fire withdrawals without first confirming that the requested money still existed in a user's account. "In this fashion, \[Zhong\], using each of the fraud accounts, moved at least approximately 50,000 Bitcoin out of Silk Road in just a few days," reads the affidavit, which was signed by IRS-CI special agent Trevor McAleenan.

Over the nine years that followed, Zhong appears to have left that massive windfall almost entirely unspent—perhaps for fear that cashing it out into traditional currency would attract the attention of law enforcement. But even that epic restraint appears to have been in vain, as IRS-CI investigators nonetheless traced Zhong's coins to his accounts on an unnamed cryptocurrency exchange, which revealed his identity. Zhong's case closely mirrors the story of the earlier Silk Road hacker, referred to in court documents only as Individual X, who similarly exploited a vulnerability in the Silk Road to take nearly 70,000 bitcoins from the site and hold them for more than seven years. But, perhaps due to the vagaries of negotiations over massive cryptocurrency fortunes, no charges against Individual X have been publicly revealed. Zhong, by contrast, now faces a wire fraud conviction that carries as much as 20 years in prison.

The Silk Road was torn down by a massive law enforcement operation in late 2013, leading to the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the site's creator, who was sentenced to life in prison and ordered to pay $183 million in restitution. In yet another bizarre twist, however, a portion of the seized 70,000 bitcoins taken from the Silk Road by Individual X were applied toward Ulbricht's debt, paying it off in full in exchange for his agreement not to lay any claim to the remaining money.

Using bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road to pay off the restitution of that site's creator may seem like a strange turn of events. But in an era when IRS-CI cryptocurrency seizures regularly pours billions of dollars into the US Treasury, there seems to be plenty to go around.

IRS Seizes Another Silk Road Hacker’s $3.36 Billion Bitcoin Stash

Edward Perez says that “manufactured chaos” by bad actors will be even riskier thanks to Elon Musk’s own mayhem.

The staff shortages worry those monitoring the elections too. “I spoke to Elon Musk,” Jessica González, co-CEO of US media advocacy group Free Press, said at a press conference on Friday. “He promised to retain and enforce the election integrity measures that were on Twitter's books before his takeover. With today's mass layoffs, it's clear that Musk's actions betray his words."

González said that Free Press had been pressing Twitter since the summer to fully enforce its election integrity plan—and that showing staff the door undermines that plan. (Twitter did not respond immediately to a request for comment; Musk did not respond immediately to an email.)

Even small actions like preventing staff members from accessing physical offices on Friday as Musk and his coterie of advisers carried out their layoffs can have a significant impact, Perez says. “This is an utterly chaotic environment a few days away from an election to allow these very talented, very thoughtful, very dedicated people to do this important work,” he says.

Never mind getting the mind-space to do their work amid a maelstrom, there’s also the simple issue of whether there are enough staff there to handle what the election may bring.

One former Twitter employee, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, tells WIRED that the company prepared for the election months in advance. “This close to the vote, the materials are there,” they say. “It’s whether anyone left knows how to or wants to deploy it.” Perez points out that Twitter was well prepared with institutional structures and threat models to assess election risk. “But it would be a mistake to simply assume in the midst of these layoffs, and that amount of change, that the work can continue as it has before.”

Perez asks whether there are enough people with institutional expertise to analyze what Twitter’s machine-learning models that monitor speech on the platform are detecting; whether the models will still work to identify harmful keywords; and if the models will still surface questionable content for human moderators to review. “I don't know the answer to all of that,” he admits. “But it certainly doesn't look good when you're cutting 50 percent of very talented employees.”

Speaking on Friday afternoon, Perez didn’t know how many people in Twitter’s election integrity team were still at their post. His product team was only one part of Twitter’s election organization. The civic integrity team in all, including product and engineering staff, alongside policy experts in different regions, was more than 100 strong. Likewise, he’s uncertain what impact Musk’s seeming total abandonment of Twitter’s curation team will have on how the election plays out.

“For all the talk of algorithms and automation, a lot of the good of Twitter was humans being experts in interests and the platform,” says the former Twitter employee. Buckley believes that Musk might feel a degree of separation from the issue of election integrity. “His actions won’t threaten democracy and civic decency directly,” he says, “but they certainly will allow those wishing to undermine these things to do so.”

Nor is it just November 8 that Twitter—and the world—has to worry about. Perez is concerned that even if the elections implausibly go off without a hitch on Twitter, there will be weeks, if not months, of disinformation-filled aftermath.

“We're likely to have some candidates that, without any evidence of facts, will allege irregularities in the election,” says Perez. “I think it's reasonable to assume there will probably be some candidates that refuse to concede the results, and we will almost certainly have false and baseless allegations about so-called problems with voting technology.”

The sum of that is what Perez calls “manufactured chaos”: coordinated attempts to sow chaos by partisan political actors, including seeding disinformation through social media like Twitter. We know it’s coming this week, and we know from past experience its potential impact. The question is whether Musk’s public square is prepared to handle it.

“It is a very, very challenging and complex problem to try to mitigate the harmful effects of all that disinformation,” says Perez. “And I cannot think of a worse time for Elon Musk to cut off Twitter's resources at the knees.”

Twitter’s Ex-Election Chief Is Worried About the US Midterms

Plus: Liz Truss’ phone-hacking trouble, Cash App’s sex-trafficking problem, and the rising cost of ransomware.

Open internet proponents were relieved last month when an American candidate beat a Russian challenger in an election to run the International Telecommunications Union, an important international standards body tasked with cross-boundary communications. Meanwhile, though, we took a look at the fragility of the world’s internet infrastructure and the vulnerability of crucial undersea cables.

Researchers see evidence that the US’s new legal climate for abortion access is promoting a culture of community surveillance, a hallmark of authoritarian states in which neighbors and friends are encouraged to report possible wrongdoing. And surveillance is on the rise in soccer stadiums around the world as well. The eight stadiums in use during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, for example, will be packed with more than 15,000 cameras to monitor spectators and to conduct biometric scanning.

The more secure, “memory safe” programming language Rust is making inroads across the tech industry, offering hope that a massive swath of common vulnerabilities could eventually be preempted and eliminated. In the meantime, we’ve got a roundup of the most important vulnerabilities that you can—and should!—patch right now.

And there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

There’s no longer a question about whether TikTok staff in China can access Europeans’ data. The company this week announced that it plans to update its privacy policy to explicitly list China as one of the countries where workers can access data from users in the European Union, such as location data that users opt to share. TikTok’s policy update comes amid a yearlong investigation by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is looking into its data-transfer policies under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The inquiry is part of Western governments’ increased scrutiny of the video-sharing platform, which some US officials have characterized as a national security threat due to frequently close relationships between Chinese companies and the government in Beijing. TikTok, which is owned by China-based ByteDance, says in its announcement that its privacy policy update is meant to “include greater transparency into how we share user information outside of Europe and how we collect user location information.” The new policy goes into effect on December 2.

Liz Truss is having a rough time. Soon after her historically brief stint as the UK prime minister, the _Mail on Sunday_ reported that agents working on behalf of Russia had hacked her personal cell phone when she was foreign minister. The breach allegedly allowed these Russian operatives to intercept messages between Truss and officials in other countries, including messages about Ukraine. The _Mail_ report further claims that former prime minister Boris Johnson and cabinet secretary Simon Case suppressed the breach. While the breach remains unconfirmed, Labor Party officials are calling for an “urgent investigation” into their Conservative opponents. "There are immensely important national security issues raised by an attack like this by a hostile state which will have been taken extremely seriously by our intelligence and security agencies," Labor Party shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said last weekend. "There are also serious security questions around why and how this information has been leaked or released right now, which must also be urgently investigated."

Another of Jack Dorsey’s corporate creations is facing new heat this week. According to a _Forbes_ investigation, the Cash App is helping fuel sex trafficking in the US and elsewhere. Based on police records, “hundreds of court filings,” and claims by former Cash App employees, the investigation found rampant use of the Cash App in sex trafficking and other crimes. The company, which is owned by Dorsey-led Block Inc., maintains that it “does not tolerate illegal activity on Cash App” and has staff dedicated to working with law enforcement. Meanwhile, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that although rival payment platforms like PayPal provide the the center with tips about potential child abuse facilitated by their services, _Forbes_ writes, “Block hasn’t provided any tips, ever.”

The US Treasury Department this week said US financial institutions facilitated ransomware payments totaling nearly $1.2 billion in 2021—a 200 percent increase since 2020. The report landed amid an international White House summit aiming to combat the rise of ransomware, a type of malware that allows attackers to encrypt a target’s files and hold them for ransom until the victim pays. Himamauli Das, acting director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, said in a statement that “ransomware—including attacks perpetrated by Russian-linked actors—remain a serious threat to our national and economic security. While $1.2 billion in payments is already painful enough, the number does not take into account the costs and other financial consequences that come with a ransomware attack outside of the payment itself.

TikTok Admits Staff in China Can Access Europeans’ Data

Stadiums around the world, including at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, are subjecting spectators to invasive biometric surveillance tech.

“Public safety is a longstanding justification for the spread of biometric surveillance systems, while Covid-19 introduced a health dimension through body-temperature monitoring,” Hutchins says. “Marketing speaks to a seamless consumer experience for attendees at high-profile and high-cost events and encompasses everything from ease of movement in and out of the stadium through to minimizing queues for toilets and food and drinks.”

Is the deployment of such systems inevitable? “The problem here is the idea that the rollout of such technologies and infrastructures are unavoidable and an increasingly ‘natural’ part of the stadium experience,” says Hutchins. He stresses the importance of “clear and visible notifications for spectators that such technologies are in use.” Most importantly, he advocates for the introduction of “strong legislative and regulatory safeguards governing the introduction and use of these systems and the control and use of data.”

Indeed, European lawmakers have been attempting to regulate biometric mass surveillance. In April 2021, the European Commission submitted a proposal for an EU regulatory framework on artificial intelligence. Currently, the European Parliament is forming its opinion on the proposal, while the European Council is due to discuss the file in early December.

“The European Commission’s draft AI Act recognized that biometric identification is an inherently risky technology but bizarrely put forward a prohibition in Article 5 that is so weak, if anything it amounts to more of a blueprint for how to conduct biometric mass surveillance than a genuine ban,” explains EDRi’s Jakubowska.

Although there hasn’t been a final vote yet, members of the European Parliament have supported a full ban on remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces, by both public and private actors, and are likely to adopt that final position. However, such a ban would not include emotion-recognition uses of biometric systems, nor biometric categorization (e.g. profiling people based on their age, gender, or ethnicity). “We think that those urgently need to be banned in the AI Act. Shockingly, in the vast majority of cases, the Commission’s text did not even make those uses high-risk,” says Jakubowska.

“There should be no exceptions to the ban, as even a supposedly narrow exception would mean that mass facial recognition infrastructure would be rolled out and primed to be switched on whenever it is deemed necessary,” she adds. By definition, these systems scan the faces or bodies of every person who passes by, so it is not technically possible to limit them to, for example, suspects or perpetrators of serious crime.

In the US, the Biden administration has proposed a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which commentators consider toothless, as it does not contain clear prohibitions on AI deployments that have been most controversial, like the use of facial recognition for mass surveillance.

As Qatar prepares to roll out the red carpet, fresh reports suggest everyone traveling to the country during the World Cup will be asked to download two apps that, according to experts, essentially hand over all the information on your phone. They say this highlights the urgent need for privacy regulation in global sporting events.

“Without regulation, there is a tendency to hoover up all available data and hold on to it indefinitely—this creates ‘honey pots’ for hackers and also contributes to function creep: the temptation to find other uses for the data,_”_ says Hutchins.

“Law enforcement agencies should pursue the many other tools and techniques at their disposal and that are compliant with the rule of law and human rights, rather than resorting to the use of technologies that have been widely condemned by civil society, human rights lawyers, and even UN human rights authorities,” says Jakubowska.

“Once these tools are out there, governments will argue that they should be used widely,” she summarizes. “It’s a gateway to mass surveillance.”

Soccer Fans, You're Being Watched

Rust makes it impossible to introduce some of the most common security vulnerabilities. And its adoption can’t come soon enough.

Whether you run IT for a massive organization or simply own a smartphone, you're intimately familiar with the unending stream of software updates that constantly need to be installed because of bugs and security vulnerabilities. People make mistakes, so code is inevitably going to contain mistakes—you get it. But a growing movement to write software in a language called Rust is gaining momentum because the code is goof-proof in an important way. By design, developers can't accidentally create the most common types of exploitable security vulnerabilities when they're coding in Rust, a distinction that could make a huge difference in the daily patch parade and ultimately the world's baseline cybersecurity.

There are fads in programming languages, and new ones come and go, often without lasting impact. Now 12 years old, Rust took time to mature from the side project of a Mozilla researcher into a robust ecosystem. Meanwhile, the predecessor language C, which is still widely used today, turned 50 this year. But because Rust produces more secure code and, crucially, doesn't worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support.

“It’s going viral as a language,” says Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering for Android security and privacy. “We’ve been investing in Rust on Android and across Google, and so many engineers are like, ‘How do I start doing this? This is great.’ And Rust just landed for the first time as an officially recognized and accepted language in Linux. So this is not just Android; any system based on Linux now can start to incorporate Rust components.”

Rust is what's known as a “memory-safe” language because it's designed to make it impossible for a program to pull unintended data from a computer's memory accidentally. When programmers use stalwart languages that don't have this property, including C and C++, they have to carefully check the parameters of what data their program is going to be requesting and how—a task that even the most skilled and experienced developers will occasionally botch. By writing new software in Rust instead, even amateur programmers can be confident that they haven't introduced any memory-safety bugs into their code.

A program's memory is a shared resource used by all of its features and libraries. Imagine a calendar program written in a language that isn't memory-safe. You open your calendar and then request entries for November 2, 2022, and the program fetches all information from the area of your computer's memory assigned to store that date’s data. All good. But if the program isn't designed with the right constraints, and you request entries for November 42, 2022, the software, instead of producing an error or other failure, may dutifully return information from a part of the memory that's housing different data—maybe the password you use to protect your calendar or the credit card number you keep on file for premium calendar features. And if you add a birthday party to your calendar on November 42, it may overwrite unrelated data in memory instead of telling you that it can't complete the task. These are known as “out-of-bounds” read and write bugs, and you can see how they could potentially be exploited to give an attacker improper access to data or even expanded system control.

Another common type of memory-safety bug, known as “use-after-free,” involves a situation where a program has given up its claim to a portion of memory (maybe you deleted all your calendar entries for October 2022) but mistakenly retains access. If you later request data from October 17, the program may be able to grab whatever data has ended up there. And the existence of memory-safety vulnerabilities in code also introduces the possibility that a hacker could craft, say, a malicious calendar invitation with a strategically chosen date or set of event details designed to manipulate the memory to grant the attacker remote access.

These types of vulnerabilities aren't just esoteric software bugs. Research and auditing have repeatedly found that they make up the majority of all software vulnerabilities. So while you can still make mistakes and create security flaws while programming in Rust, the opportunity to eliminate memory-safety vulnerabilities is significant.

“Memory-safety issues are responsible for a huge, huge percentage of all reported vulnerabilities, and this is in critical applications like operating systems, mobile phones, and infrastructure,” says Dan Lorenc, CEO of the software supply-chain security company Chainguard. “Over the decades that people have been writing code in memory-unsafe languages, we’ve tried to improve and build better tooling and teach people how to not make these mistakes, but there are just limits to how much telling people to try harder can actually work. So you need a new technology that just makes that entire class of vulnerabilities impossible, and that’s what Rust is finally bringing to the table.”

Rust is not without its skeptics and detractors. The effort over the last two years to implement Rust in Linux has been controversial, partly because adding support for any other language inherently increases complexity, and partly because of debates about how, specifically, to go about making it all work. But proponents emphasize that Rust has the necessary elements—it doesn't cause performance loss, and it interoperates well with software written in other languages—and that it is crucial simply because it meets a dire need.

“It’s less that it’s the right choice and more that it’s ready,” Lorenc, a longtime open-source contributor and researcher, says. “There are no real alternatives right now, other than not doing anything, and that’s just not an option anymore. Continuing to use memory-unsafe code for another decade would be a massive problem for the tech industry, for national security, for everything.”

One of the biggest challenges of the transition to Rust, though, is precisely all the decades that developers have already spent writing vital code in memory-unsafe languages. Writing new software in Rust doesn't address that massive backlog. The Linux kernel implementation, for example, is starting on the periphery by supporting Rust-based drivers, the programs that coordinate between an operating system and hardware like a printer.

“When you’re doing operating systems, speed and performance is always top-of-mind, and the parts that you’re running in C++ or C are usually the parts that you just can’t run in Java or other memory-safe languages, because of performance,” Google's Kleidermacher says. “So to be able to run Rust and have the same performance but get the memory safety is really cool. But it’s a journey. You can’t just go and rewrite 50 million lines of code overnight, so we’re carefully picking security-critical components, and over time we’ll retrofit other things.”

In Android, Kleidermacher says a lot of encryption-key-management features are now written in Rust, as is the private internet communication feature DNS over HTTPS, a new version of the ultra-wideband chip stack, and the new Android Virtualization Framework used in Google's custom Tensor G2 chips. He adds that the Android team is increasingly converting connectivity stacks like those for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to Rust because they are based on complex industry standards and tend to contain a lot of vulnerabilities. In short, the strategy is to start getting incremental security benefits from converting the most exposed or vital software components to Rust first and then working inward from there. 

“Yes, it’s a lot of work, it will be a lot of work, but the tech industry has how many trillions of dollars, plus how many talented programmers? We have the resources," says Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group, which runs the memory-safety initiative Prossimo as well as the free certificate authority Let's Encrypt. “Problems that are merely a lot of work are great."

As Rust makes the transition to mainstream adoption, the case for some type of solution to memory-safety issues seems to get made again and again every day. Just this week, a high-criticality vulnerability in the ubiquitous secure communication library OpenSSL could have been prevented if the mechanism were written in a memory-safe language. And unlike the notorious 2014 OpenSSL vulnerability Heartbleed, which lurked unnoticed for two years and exposed websites across the internet to data interception attacks, this new bug had been introduced into OpenSSL in the past few months, in spite of efforts to reduce memory-safety vulnerabilities.

“How many people right now are living the identity-theft nightmare because of a memory-safety bug? Or on a national security level, if we’re worried about cyberattacks on the United States, how much of that threat is on the back of memory-safety vulnerabilities?” Aas says. “From my point of view, the whole game now is just convincing people to put in the effort. Do we understand the threat well enough, and do we have the will.”

The Rise of Rust, the ‘Viral’ Secure Programming Language That’s Taking Over Tech

Underwater cables keep the internet online. When they congregate in one place, things get tricky.

The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 internet cable travels 15,500 miles along the seafloor, connecting Hong Kong to Marseille, France. As it snakes through the South China Sea and toward Europe, the cable helps provide internet connections to more than a dozen countries, from India to Greece. When the cable was cut on June 7, millions of people were plunged offline and faced temporary internet blackouts.

The cable, also known as AAE-1, was severed where it briefly passes across land through Egypt. One other cable was also damaged in the incident, with the cause of the damage unknown. However, the impact was immediate. “It affected about seven countries and a number of over-the-top services,” says Rosalind Thomas, the managing director of SAEx International Management, which plans to create a new undersea cable connecting Africa, Asia, and the US. “The worst was Ethiopia, that lost 90 percent of its connectivity, and Somalia thereafter also 85 percent.” Cloud services belonging to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were all also disrupted, subsequent analysis revealed.

While connectivity was restored in a few hours, the disruption highlights the fragility of the world’s 550-plus subsea internet cables, plus the outsized role Egypt and the nearby Red Sea have in the internet’s infrastructure. The global network of underwater cables forms a large part of the internet’s backbone, carrying the majority of data around the world and eventually linking up to the networks that power cell towers and Wi-Fi connections. Subsea cables connect New York to London and Australia to Los Angeles.

Sixteen of these submarine cables—which are often no thicker than a hosepipe and are vulnerable to damage from ships’ anchors and earthquakes—pass 1,200 miles through the Red Sea before they hop over land in Egypt and get to the Mediterranean Sea, connecting Europe to Asia. The last two decades have seen the route emerge as one of the world’s largest internet chokepoints and, arguably, the internet’s most vulnerable place on Earth. (The region, which also includes the Suez Canal, is also a global choke point for shipping and the movement of goods. Chaos ensued when the container ship _Ever Given_ got wedged in the canal in 2021.)

“Where there are chokepoints, there are single points of failure,” Nicole Starosielski, an associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and an author on submarine cables. “Because it's a site of intense concentration of global movement, that does make it more vulnerable than many places around the world.”

The area has also recently gained attention from the European Parliament, which in a June report highlighted it as a risk for widespread internet disruption. “The most vital bottleneck for the EU concerns the passage between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean via the Red Sea because the core connectivity to Asia runs via this route,” the report says, flagging extremism and maritime terrorism are risks in the area.

Pyramid Scheme

Look at Egypt on a map of the world’s subsea internet cables and it immediately becomes clear why internet experts have been concerned about the area for years. The 16 cables in the area are concentrated through the Red Sea and touch land in Egypt, where they make a 100-mile journey across the country to reach the Mediterranean Sea. (Cable maps don’t show the exact locations of cables.)

It has been estimated that around 17 percent of the world’s internet traffic travels along these cables and passes through Egypt. Alan Mauldin, the research director of telecoms market research firm TeleGeography, says last year the region had 178 terabits of capacity, or 178,000,000 Mbps—the US has median home internet speeds of 167 Mbps.

The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet

Authoritarian societies depend on people ratting each other out for activities that were recently legal—and it's already happening in the US.

There’s a knock at the door. Local authorities have received a tip that you’ve broken the moral code—a new set of laws banning your once-accepted lifestyle. You’re being called in for questioning, and it’s unclear when you’ll return home.

In an authoritarian state, neighborhood trust is a thing of the past. Citizens are often encouraged to report any perceived wrongdoing in their communities to the government. There are countless examples of this in history—and around the world today. It happens in Russia, and there’s even an app for it in Saudi Arabia.

In the United States, we appear to be creeping toward this culture of community surveillance. Texas’ SB 8 deputized everyday Americans to sue anyone who has had an abortion or assisted with one. Texans are reporting the parents of transgender children to authorities. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin set up a tip line and encouraged parents to report teachers who are teaching “divisive” subjects. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law encourages parents to monitor teachers. With the Republican Party increasingly embracing authoritarianism, this is likely just the start.

Tom Ginsburg, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago, says these kinds of policies are an American version of what you might see in authoritarian states.

“It incentivizes private enforcement of moral norms,” Ginsburg says. “That’s very corrosive. It’s a process that is undermining the ability of society to function in the traditional way that societies do.”

Ginsburg says he worries that we’re losing democracy in states where Republican candidates for office appear willing to subvert future elections, which means citizens’ ability to reject authoritarian leaders may be slipping away. He says he doesn’t think our conservative Supreme Court has any interest in helping prevent democratic backsliding, either.

“The Supreme Court may facilitate the undermining of democracy from below through the general stance of, ‘Well, that’s not our problem,’” Ginsburg says.

Consuelo Amat, an assistant professor of political science at John Hopkins University, says that when a state becomes authoritarian, anything people in your community learned about you during democratic years can be used against you once the new regime takes power. She’s closely studied Chile under dictator Augusto Pinochet and says that’s what happened there. Amat says those who support the new regime can essentially become informants for it.

“When that starts happening, the dynamic for communities and neighborhoods is extremely bad,” Amat says. “The distrust that people have is huge, so people start not sharing information at all. One of the cores of democracy is neighborhood trust. You need to trust others in your society and in your community for democracy to work. Period. When there’s a very high level of distrust, you will see a fracturing of community.”

If the US moves further toward authoritarianism, you can imagine states passing more laws to disempower, criminalize, or otherwise marginalize certain groups. Anyone you encounter on a regular basis who doesn’t agree with politically could be encouraged to report you for violations of these laws as some sort of act of civic duty. They’ll have more ways to do it than ever before, considering modern technology allows us to monitor people’s social media feeds, watch them through Ring cameras, report them through community-watch apps like Citizen, and more.

Beyond the actions of an authoritarian government, Amat also worries about how paramilitary groups and right-wing extremists could be empowered to enforce a new moral code. This could be done through legal and illegal channels and range from collecting information on people to harassing or even harming political adversaries. Amat says illegal actions become more likely when these groups don’t think they’ll face consequences for their actions, as when a prominent political figure promises to pardon those people if elected and encourages supporters to act violently.

“If the rule of law starts breaking—and especially if there’s a regime that is supportive of those actions—that’s really giving space for people to take actions that are illegal,” Amat says. “Knowing you will not be prosecuted is a big thing.”

All of these sorts of things create a culture of fear in authoritarian countries. People are afraid of their neighbors, afraid to speak freely, and afraid of what might happen next. This fear is made worse by the fact that the citizens dealing with oppressive forces have no ability to hold those in power accountable when they go too far.

The future of American democracy and the rights of citizens remain in question. Amat says anyone worried about an authoritarian future needs to take actions to protect democratic institutions and their way of life.

“Institutions are not in a void,” Amat says. “They are populated by human beings who make choices.”

When Your Neighbor Turns You In

Plus: Important patches from Apple, VMWare, Cisco, Zimbra, SAP, and Oracle.

Other issues fixed in October are a heap buffer overflow in WebSQL tracked as CVE-2022-3446 and a use-after-free bug in Permissions API tracked as CVE-2022-3448, Google wrote in its blog. Google also fixed two use-after-free bugs in Safe Browsing and in Peer Connection.

Google Android

The Android Security Bulletin for October includes fixes for 15 flaws in the Framework and System and 33 issues in the kernel and vendor components. One of the most concerning issues is a critical security vulnerability in the Framework component that could lead to local escalation of privilege, tracked as CVE-2022-20419. Meanwhile, a flaw in the Kernel could also lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed.

None of the issues are known to have been used in attacks, but it still makes sense to check your device and update it when you can. Google has issued the update to its Pixel devices and it’s also available for the Samsung Galaxy S21 and S22 series smartphones and Galaxy S21 FE.

Cisco

Cisco has urged companies to patch two flaws in its AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows after it was confirmed the vulnerabilities are being used in attacks. Tracked as CVE-2020-3433, the first could allow an attacker with valid credentials on Windows to execute code on the affected machine with system privileges.

Meanwhile, CVE-2020-3153 could allow an attacker with valid Windows credentials to copy malicious files to arbitrary locations with system-level privileges.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added the Cisco flaws to its already exploited vulnerabilities catalog.

While both the Cisco flaws require the attacker to be authenticated, it’s still important to update now.

Zoom

Video conferencing service Zoom patched several issues in October, including a flaw in its Zoom client for meetings, which is marked as having a high severity with a CVSS Score of 8.8. Zoom says versions before version 5.12.2 are susceptible to a URL-parsing vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-28763.

“If a malicious Zoom meeting URL is opened, the link may direct the user to connect to an arbitrary network address, leading to additional attacks including session takeovers,” Zoom said in a security bulletin.

Earlier in the month, Zoom alerted users that its client for meetings for macOS starting with 5.10.6 and prior to 5.12.0 contained a debugging port misconfiguration.

VMWare

Software giant VMWare has patched a serious vulnerability in its Cloud Foundation

Tracked as CVE-2021-39144. The remote code execution vulnerability via XStream open source library is rated as having a critical severity with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 9.8. “Due to an unauthenticated endpoint that leverages XStream for input serialization in VMware Cloud Foundation, a malicious actor can get remote code execution in the context of 'root' on the appliance,” VMWare said in an advisory.

The VMware Cloud Foundation update also addresses an XML External Entity vulnerability with a lesser CVSSv3 base score of 5.3. Tracked as CVE-2022-31678, the bug could allow an unauthenticated user to perform denial of service.

Zimbra

Software firm Zimbra has issued patches to fix an already-exploited code execution flaw that could allow an attacker to access user accounts. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-41352, has a CVSS severity score of 9.8.

Exploitation was spotted by Rapid7 researchers, who identified signs it had been used in attacks. Zimbra initially released a workaround to fix it, but now the patch is available, you should apply it ASAP.

SAP

Enterprise software firm SAP has published 23 new and updated Security Notes in its October Patch Day. Among the most serious issues is a critical Path Traversal vulnerability in SAP Manufacturing Execution. The vulnerability affects two plugins: Work Instruction Viewer and Visual Test and Repair and has a CVSS score of 9.9.

Another issue with a CVSS score of 9.6 is an account hijacking vulnerability in the SAP Commerce login page.

Oracle

Software giant Oracle has released a whopping 370 patches as part of its quarterly security update. Oracle’s Critical Patch Update for October fixes 50 vulnerabilities rated as critical.

The update contains 37 new security patches for Oracle MySQL, 11 of which may be remotely exploitable without authentication. It also contains 24 new security patches for Oracle Financial Services Applications, 16 of which may be remotely exploitable without authentication.

Due to “the threat posed by a successful attack,” Oracle “strongly recommends” that customers apply Critical Patch Update security patches as soon as possible.

You Need to Update Google Chrome, Windows, and Zoom Right Now

Open-internet advocates are breathing a sigh of relief after a recent election for the International Telecommunications Union's top leadership.

While Bogdan-Martin’s win was significant, the down-ballot races also seemed to indicate a rejection of this expanded ITU mandate. A Russian incumbent lost his spot on the ITU’s radio regulatory board, while Russia was shut out of a seat on a broader regulatory council. Iran, which runs one of the world’s most expansive and authoritarian internet-filtering systems, also lost its council seat.

While China fared better, its support declined considerably. In 2018, Houlin Zhao was elected secretary-general with no competition—in 2022, a Chinese candidate came third in a race for a lesser position, only narrowly securing him a spot on the board.

Some of these successes are undoubtedly a result of American reengagement; the Trump White House first announced a plan to prioritize organizations like the ITU, which had been ignored by Washington for years, in 2017, in order to counteract China’s increasing success at these international bodies. Over the past year, President Joe Biden energetically campaigned for Bogdan-Martin’s candidacy.

Geopolitics—and Russia’s war against Ukraine, in particular—undoubtedly helped reshape the ITU’s leadership.

When Bella Cherkesova, a Russian deputy minister, stood to address the conference, she railed against the United States and its allies. “Recently, at the behest of certain countries, we have been confronting the politicization of the Union’s work,” Cherkesova said, lamenting that fully a third of Russia’s delegates had their visas rejected and could not attend the conference and that other Russian officials were not nominated to various administrative posts.

Cherkesova went on to laud Moscow’s promotion of the internet. “Russia provides security, protection of public order, health and morals of the population on the internet,” she said.

In a dueling speech, one of Ukraine’s representatives to the ITU offered a poignant counterpoint. “Representatives of the aggressor country are also here and talk about progress and standards,” Yurii Shchyhol, chair of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine, told the conference. “We have to defend ourselves.”

Shchyhol added that Russia had “turned into a weapon” the basic technology that the ITU is tasked with regulating and expanding. “Today, seven months after the invasion, we understand that the Russian Federation has also sought to destroy the connection in Ukraine,” Shchyhol continued, listing a variety of ways in which Russia has allegedly violated ITU rules.

While think tanks like CSIS and the Heritage Foundation have encouraged American engagement at the ITU to be focused on counteracting China, analysts more intimately involved in the ITU say the fight is more complicated—and, they say, this month’s meeting lacked ambition.

In its analysis of the proposals up for debate at the conference, the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes open technology, expressed disappointment that the ITU did not codify more formal cooperation with organizations like ICANN, nor did it make additional space for researchers and non-governmental organizations.

The Center for Democracy & Technology’s Knodel, who was also part of the American delegation, says inviting advocates like her has “made the ITU vastly more open than it once was. However, nongovernment stakeholders are far from welcomed at the ITU, which in the internet age is a stark contrast to the governance fora that are largely responsible for internet standardization and the cooperation required for implementing its decentralized design.”

While states like China are “proposing more technical designs that centralize control and surveillance,” Knodel says, even many of those discussions were sidestepped at the most recent conference.

Other big issues, like how to handle fees paid to countries that handle the fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet—which could undercut revenues for poorer countries—have also been left unresolved.

Knodel says, with this new ITU leadership in place, the priority for the future should be figuring out “how to extend meaningful access to the internet rather than eroding it.”

The Election That Saved the Internet From Russia and China

Plus: The New York Post gets hacked, a huge stalkerware network is exposed, and the US claims China interfered with its Huawei probe.

For years, AlphaBay ruled the dark web. If you were in the market to buy drugs or stolen credit cards, the digital bazaar was the place to turn. At its peak, more than 350,000 products were listed for sale—an estimated 10 times the size of the notorious Silk Road market—and the website proved to be the ire of law enforcement the world round. That was until cops took AlphaBay offline in 2017.

This week, WIRED published the first in a six-part series detailing the hunt for Alpha02, the mastermind believed to be behind AlphaBay, and the huge international takedown operation that wiped the marketplace from the web. Each week, we’ll publish a new part of the series, excerpted from WIRED reporter Andy Greenberg’s new book, _Tracers in the Dark_.

Schools across the US have faced dozens of hoax calls about mass shootings in recent months. After a call is made, police scramble to the scene fearing the worst, only to find out there is no shooter. Now hoax phone call recordings obtained by WIRED and conversations with law enforcement officials reveal how the calls have been made and show that law enforcement officials are closing in on the alleged hoaxer. Police are looking for a male “with a heavy accent described as Middle Eastern or African” and have linked the phone calls to Ethiopia.

Elsewhere, a bug in Apple’s new macOS 13 Ventura operating system is causing problems for malware scanners and security monitoring tools. With the new software update, Apple accidentally crippled third-party security products in a way users may not notice. The company is planning to fix the bug in an upcoming software release.

We also looked at a newly discovered Chinese influence operation that is targeting US elections—although it is not having much success. And now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, here’s how you should think about your privacy and security on the bird website.

But wait, there’s more! Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Officials in Canada and the Netherlands are investigating allegations that Chinese police forces have operated a network of illegal police stations within their countries. According to reports that emerged this week, Chinese police forces have been operating out of clandestine bases and using their presence to track and threaten dissidents. The Dutch government has called such sites “illegal” and said it is “investigating exactly what they are doing here,” while officials in Canada said they are investigating “so-called ‘police’ stations.”

However, it is just the tip of the iceberg. Spanish civil rights group Safeguard Defenders first claimed that Chinese police forces from the cities of Fuzhou and Qingtian were running “overseas police service stations” across the West in a report published in September. Since 2018, the group claims, more than 38 police service stations have appeared in “dozens of countries” spread across five different continents. “Such overseas police ‘service stations’ have been used by police back in China to carry out such ‘persuasion to return’ operations on foreign soil, including in Europe,” the report states. Lawmakers in both England and Scotland are also planning on investigating the stations, reports say.

Chinese officials have not denied the existence of the service stations, but say they exist to provide bureaucratic services to Chinese citizens and don’t involve police operations. The Chinese embassy in Canada said the stations exist to allow Chinese citizens to complete tasks such as renewing their driving licenses: “The main purpose of the service station abroad is to provide free assistance to overseas Chinese citizens in this regard.”

If stalkerware is installed on your phone or laptop, the malicious software can send every tap, message, and photo back to the person who added it to your device. The software is often hard to find, and the insidious industry that creates it operates in the shadows. This week, a TechCrunch investigation revealed how a huge stalkerware network, with hundreds of thousands of victims, operates.

Leaked data obtained by TechCrunch shows TheTruthSpy stalkerware has been installed on more than 300,000 devices and has victims all around the world. Over a six-week period analyzed by the publication, more than 9,400 new devices were infected with the stalkerware. Thousands of calls, millions of text messages, and more than 470,000 photos and videos were collected by the app without its victims’ knowledge. And data was also likely collected from the phones of children. This tool can tell if your device was compromised.

A pair of Chinese intelligence officers attempted to bribe a US official involved in the criminal case against Huawei, the US Department of Justice claimed this week. Across three separate cases, the Justice Department charged 13 people with alleged efforts to “exert influence” in the US on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. The charges range from trying to disrupt the US government’s Huawei investigation to trying to recruit people as intelligence agents. Two people were also arrested for allegedly attempting to “cause the forced repatriation” of a Chinese national living in the US. “The actions announced today take place against a backdrop of malign activity from the government of the People’s Republic of China that includes espionage, attempts to disrupt our justice system, harassment of individuals, and ongoing efforts to steal sensitive US technology,” deputy attorney general Lisa O. Monaco said in a statement. In an unprecedented move in July, the head of the FBI and the UK’s MI5 made a joint public appearance to warn about the perceived threat from China, saying the nation is the biggest threat to economic and national security.

The website and Twitter account of the _New York Post_ were hacked this week. On Thursday, the publication’s Twitter account started sharing links to stories with offensive headlines and posts about politicians. US president Joe Biden, US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York governor Kathy Hochul were all targeted. The _Post_, which is owned by News Corp, tweeted that it was investigating the incident, but very few details have been made public so far. In February this year, News Corp announced it had been hacked, with the attackers believed to have accessed journalists’ emails. The latest attack against the _Post_ echoes a recent hack of the business news website _Fast Company_. In September, the publication’s content management system (CMS) was breached and the attacker sent offensive push notifications to Apple News subscribers.

Source

Wired