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What a week! On Monday, police arrested Luigi Mangione, 26, and charged him with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione’s five-day flight from authorities ended after he was seen eating at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 300 miles from Manhattan, where Thompson was shot to death on the morning of December 4. Authorities say they found Mangione carrying fake IDs and a 3D device. -printed “ghost gun”, the model of which is known as FMDA, or “Free Men Don’t Ask.”
Meanwhile, a spate of mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey and neighboring states caused so much havoc that it quickly attracted federal attention. While many people wondered why the U.S. military couldn’t just shoot down the drones, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and independent experts say that the drone mystery may not be much of a mystery, and that the drones are probably in mostly just airplanes.
As for more terrestrial threats, we delve into the far-right realm of “Active Clubs,” small groups of young men focused on fitness, immersed in extremist ideology and linked to several violent attacks. While the man who helped invent the Active Club network, Robert Rundo, was sentenced in federal court this week, Active Clubs around the world are proliferating.
Finally, we investigate cheating schemes that use tiny cameras to gain an illicit advantage in poker, and we question the ways in which humans will use generative AI to make the world a more dangerous place.
But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news that we didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
In May, Microsoft joyfully announced Recall, an AI feature for some Windows PCs that silently takes screenshots every five seconds and then lets you easily search through the resulting fingerprint. Forgot where you saw a recipe online? Tapping a couple of keywords in Recall could, in theory, find the dish again. It didn’t take long for the privacy and security community to find major holes in the feature.
In response, Microsoft delayed the release of Recall and eventually made some significant changes, such as making Recall optional instead of enabled by default, better encrypting information captured by Recall, and adding authentication to access the data it stores. The recall was finally launched for some users this month.
However, this week, Recall testing by Tom Hardware Demonstrated that a key safeguard implemented by Microsoft may still fail. With a recovery setting called “filter sensitive information” enabled, Tom’s Hardware testing found that it still took screenshots of some sensitive information, such as credit card numbers and Social Security numbers. When the post typed a credit card number, username and password into a Notepad window, they were gathered together in the screenshots. “Similarly, when I filled out a loan application PDF in Microsoft Edge, entering a social security number, name, and date of birth, Recall captured that,” Avram Piltch. writes. The tool, however, did not record details when entered into a couple of online stores.
