In perhaps the cutest hacker story of the year, a trio of techies in India found an innovative way to circumvent Apple’s location restrictions on the AirPods Pro 2s to give their grandmother the AirPods’ hearing aid feature. can enable The hack involved a homemade Faraday cage, a microwave, and a lot of trial and error.
At the other end of the tech advancement spectrum, the US military is currently testing an AI-powered machine gun capable of automatically targeting swarms of drones. The Bullfrog, built by Allen Control Systems, is one of several innovative weapons technologies working to combat the growing threat of cheap, small drones on the battlefield.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced this week that an 18-year-old from California has admitted to carrying out or planning more than 375 attacks across the United States.
Then, of course, there’s the Donald Trump of it all. This week, we published a practical guide to protecting yourself from government surveillance. Of course, Wired has covered the dangers of government surveillance for decades. But with the president-elect clearly threatening to jail his political enemies — whatever that may be — now might be a good time to practice your digital best practices.
In addition to potential dragnet surveillance of US citizens, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement began ramping up its surveillance arsenal the day after Trump won re-election. Meanwhile, experts expect the incoming administration to roll back cybersecurity laws established under President Joe Biden while cracking down on anti-state-sponsored hackers. And if all this political upheaval has you in the mood to protest, beware: A study published jointly by WIRED and The Marshall Project found that bans on masks in several states have undermined free speech. A new layer of complexity is added to using .
And that’s not all. Each week, we round up privacy and security news that we haven’t covered ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe.
In August 2016, about 120,000 bitcoins—worth about $71 million at the time—were stolen in a hack at the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. Then in 2022, as the value of cryptocurrency skyrocketed, law enforcement officials in New York arrested husband and wife Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan in connection with the hack and laundering $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. What did (At that time, $3.6 billion in funds were recovered by law enforcement investigators.)
This week, after pleading guilty in 2023, Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years in prison for hacking and money laundering. With the subsequent rise in cryptocurrency and additional hack-related seizures, the US government has now managed to recover over $10 billion in assets. A series of operational security failures by Lichtenstein made it easy for authorities to seize the illicit cryptocurrency, but investigators also used sophisticated cryptotracing techniques to determine how the funds were stolen. And how they were later transferred.
Aside from the brazen scale of the robbery, Lichtenstein and Morgan gained online notoriety after their arrests and were ridiculed for the Forbes articles Morgan wrote and the rap videos Morgan posted on YouTube under the name “Razlekhan.” Because of Morgan, who also pleaded guilty, is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 18.
Fraudsters are increasingly adopting AI as part of their criminal toolkits—using the technology to create deep faxes, translate scripts and make their operations more efficient. But artificial intelligence is also being used against fraudsters. British telecoms firm Virgin Media and its mobile operator O2 have created a new “AI granny” that can answer scammers’ phone calls and keep talking to them. According to The Register, the system uses various AI models, which listen to what the scammer is saying and respond quickly. In one case, the company says it kept one scammer on the line for 40 minutes and fed others fake personal information. Unfortunately, the system (at least at this time) cannot directly answer calls made to your phone. Instead, O2 created a dedicated phone number for the system, which the company says has been able to add to the list of numbers that scammers call.
In a new legal strategy for those trying to hold commercial spyware vendors accountable, attorney Andrew van den Ende, who was allegedly hacked with the NSO Group spyware, the company’s two founders, Omri Levy and Shelio are directly accusing Holio, and one of its executives. Yuval Sumakh, in a case of hacking crimes. Barcelona-based human rights nonprofit Iridia announced this week that it had filed the complaint in a Catalan court. Van den Ende was reportedly the victim of a hacking campaign that used the NSO’s infamous Pegasus spyware against at least 65 Catalans. Van den Eynde and Iridia originally sued NSO Group together with Osy Technologies and Q Cyber Technologies in a Barcelona court in 2022. “The people responsible for NSO Group must explain their concrete activities,” a legal representative for Iridia and Van den Eynde wrote in the complaint, which was written in Catalan and translated by TechCrunch.
Research published this week by mobile device management firm Jamf found that North Korean-linked hackers are working to plant malware inside macOS applications built with a specific open-source software development kit. are The campaigns focused on cryptocurrency-related targets and included infrastructure similar to systems used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus group. It is unclear whether this activity resulted in victim compromise or is still in the testing phase.
Financially motivated and state-backed hackers are less likely to use malware targeting Apple Mac computers than hacking tools that infect Microsoft Windows or Linux desktops and servers. . So when Mac malware evolves, it’s usually a tipping point, but it can also be a revealing indicator of trends and preferences among hackers.
