At the beginning of the year, revelations about a new type of processor vulnerability had far-reaching implications for devices all over the world, and this week researchers disclosed yet another of these so-called "speculative execution" flaws[1] in Intel, AMD, and ARM chips.
And then, in other massive-scale incidents discovered this week, analysts found a new strain of malware called VPNFilter[2] that a sophisticated hacking group has been using to compromise home and small business routers—and at least half a million devices are already infected.
Also this week, the FBI admitted that its official figure was drastically overstated[3] for number of mobile devices it could not gain access to because of data protections like encryption. The revelation reignited controversy about the true scope of what the FBI calls the "Going Dark" problem.
In other news: WIRED took a deep look at the state of predictive policing in Los Angeles[4], and heard from some of the communities it impacts most; Facebook expanded its two-factor authentication offerings[5] so users can set it up with third-party apps instead of only with their phone numbers; and the story of a woman whose Amazon Echo sent snippets of a private conversation to a random person in her contact list was a jarring reminder of the privacy risks of smart speakers[6]—but not necessarily a reason to give yours up. Oh, and researchers at Columbia University have developed a new way to hide secret messages in chunks of text[7] by imperceptibly altering heights, widths, and curvatures of individual letters.
But wait, there's more. As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read