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Articles tagged: security
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Advice for sharing security advice
By Martin Shelton
Posted onHow to tailor guidance for your audience, and come up with a plan for keeping it up-to-date.
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A lean newsroom’s blueprint for gathering secure tips
By Halle Stockton
Posted onHow we wired together Signal, Twilio, and a spare cell phone to create a newsroom number for sources who need privacy.
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Taking care with source security when reporting on abortion
By
Posted onJournalists covering reproductive rights are tackling a challenging—but critical—beat with fast-evolving digital security risks. Learning how to minimize these risks for both sources and oneself requires identifying digital security considerations, and knowing when to communicate them and how to keep reporting materials safe.
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How to Start Taking Digital Security More Seriously
By Emma Carew Grovum
Posted onA starter pack of ideas for increasing the security of your digital footprint.
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Making SecureDrop Easier to Use for More Journalists
By Erika Owens
Posted onOur Q&A; with SecureDrop about a new workstation being developed.
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Introducing the Field Guide to Security Training in the Newsroom
By Amanda Hickman, Kevin O’Gorman, and Ryan Pitts
Posted onA practical, collaboratively written guide that everyone in newsrooms can use.
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Shields Up: In the Face of Supply Chain Attacks, Stay the Course
By Martin Shelton
Posted onEverything you need to know about supply chain attacks, a kind of security breach that targets trusted distribution channels for delivering software and hardware.
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Shields Up: Using Signal Without Giving Your Phone Number
By Martin Shelton
Posted onEncrypted messaging apps like Signal, as well as WhatsApp and Viber, use your phone number as your main username. This means that if I want to chat with someone on these apps, I have to give them my phone number. But we may have many reasons—both practical and principled—not to share our number with someone. These digits are personal.
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Shields Up: Get Your Malware Shots
By Martin Shelton
Posted onMalware lets an unauthorized third party access or take control of your device. In practice, it’s become a catch-all term for a huge variety of malicious software. That could include software that hijacks computing resources, lets an attacker monitor your screen, keystrokes,microphone, or effectively turns your device into an expensive brick.
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How to Lose Friends and Anger Journalists with PGP
By Martin Shelton
Posted onAll the reasons that journalists should look beyond PGP for sending encrypted messages.
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Why My Motto as a Security Journalist Is “Assume Breach”
By J.M. Porup
Posted onThe network is hostile. We now live next door to every sociopathic intelligence agency, corrupt police force, and mafia hacker on the planet. In such a world, we have no guarantees and few guidelines, but “assume breach” will help you stake out an improved security posture.
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Training Colleagues on Digital Security? We’ve Got Your Back
By Ryan Pitts
Posted onSecurity has felt like a topic we ought to address for a while now, and we were thrilled to partner with BuzzFeed Open Lab this month on a convening designed to improve security knowledge and practice in newsrooms everywhere.culture and technology, so we hope you’ll help us keep this guide up to date.
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A Guide to Practical Paranoia
By Stephen Lovell
Posted onIn most cases, before we lose either privacy or control, the first thing we lose is our paranoia.
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Harlo Holmes on Newsroom Security in 2017
By Harlo Holmes and Erin Kissane
Posted onHarlo Holmes is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist who leads digital security work for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the organization co-founded by Daniel Ellsberg and Trevor Timm in 2012 to fund and protect adversarial investigative journalism. Holmes has long been a contributor to the open source mobile security collective The Guardian Project, and was a founding member of the DeepLab cyberfeminist collective. In 2014, Holmes was a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the New York Times.
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Welcome to Security Week
By Erin Kissane
Posted onWhen the conversation in nerd-journalism concentrates around a particular topic, we sometimes assemble a theme week on Source to help collect the loose threads and encourage journalists (and designers and developers and data analysts) to document their related work. Sometimes they’re excuses for robotic fun, and other times a catalyst for difficult but necessary culture conversations. A Security Week in 2017, though, is a no-brainer.
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Protecting Your Sources When Releasing Sensitive Documents
By Ted Han and Quinn Norton
Posted onCritical advice for protecting sources when releasing sensitive documents.
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Wanted: Security Pitches
By Erin Kissane and Lindsay Muscato
Posted onNext month on Source, we’re running a week of pieces focused on security for journalists and news organizations—our first-ever Security Week.
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Two-Factor Authentication for Newsrooms
By Martin Shelton
Posted onPasswords are the brittle wall that keep unwanted visitors out of your accounts. Breaches can hit anyone, but as frequent targets with sensitive sources, work, and personal information at risk, reporters should take extra care. When it comes to account protection, two-factor authentication is one of the most effective defenses available.
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Shields Up: Developing Security Skepticism
By Martin Shelton
Posted onA little fear can motivate us to take action. But as consumers of security news, even the most well-intentioned reporting can scare us into paralysis—or worse, encourage us to adopt behaviors that promote a false sense of security.
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Shields Up: You Are Worthy of a Data Breach
By Martin Shelton
Posted onYou know what’s the biggest security threat to journalists? Modesty.
Product manager diary: What I learned taking an intro course in web development