Brokers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefed Capitol Hill workers not too long ago on hardening the safety of their cell units, after a contacts listing stolen from the non-public telephone of the White Home Chief of Workers Susie Wiles was reportedly used to gas a sequence of textual content messages and telephone calls impersonating her to U.S. lawmakers. However in a letter this week to the FBI, one of many Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers says the feds aren’t doing sufficient to advocate extra acceptable safety protections which can be already constructed into most shopper cell units.
A screenshot of the primary web page from Sen. Wyden’s letter to FBI Director Kash Patel.
On Could 29, The Wall Road Journal reported that federal authorities had been investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate Ms. Wiles through textual content messages and in telephone calls that will have used AI to spoof her voice. Based on The Journal, Wiles instructed associates her cellphone contacts had been hacked, giving the impersonator entry to the personal telephone numbers of among the nation’s most influential folks.
The execution of this phishing and impersonation marketing campaign — no matter its targets might have been — urged the attackers had been financially motivated, and never significantly subtle.
“It grew to become clear to among the lawmakers that the requests had been suspicious when the impersonator started asking questions on Trump that Wiles ought to have identified the solutions to—and in a single case, when the impersonator requested for a money switch, among the folks stated,” the Journal wrote. “In lots of instances, the impersonator’s grammar was damaged and the messages had been extra formal than the best way Wiles usually communicates, individuals who have acquired the messages stated. The calls and textual content messages additionally didn’t come from Wiles’s telephone quantity.”
Subtle or not, the impersonation marketing campaign was quickly punctuated by the homicide of Minnesota Home of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the capturing of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his spouse. So when FBI brokers provided in mid-June to transient U.S. Senate workers on cell threats, greater than 140 staffers took them up on that invitation (a remarkably excessive quantity contemplating that no meals was provided on the occasion).
However in accordance with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the recommendation the FBI offered to Senate staffers was largely restricted to remedial suggestions, corresponding to not clicking on suspicious hyperlinks or attachments, not utilizing public wifi networks, turning off bluetooth, holding telephone software program updated, and rebooting frequently.
“That is inadequate to guard Senate staff and different high-value targets in opposition to overseas spies utilizing superior cyber instruments,” Wyden wrote in a letter despatched right now to FBI Director Kash Patel. “Effectively-funded overseas intelligence companies wouldn’t have to depend on phishing messages and malicious attachments to contaminate unsuspecting victims with adware. Cyber mercenary corporations promote their authorities clients superior ‘zero-click’ capabilities to ship adware that don’t require any motion by the sufferer.”
Wyden pressured that to assist counter subtle assaults, the FBI must be encouraging lawmakers and their workers to allow anti-spyware defenses which can be constructed into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android telephone software program.
These embrace Apple’s Lockdown Mode, which is designed for customers who’re fearful they could be topic to focused assaults. Lockdown Mode restricts non-essential iOS options to scale back the gadget’s total assault floor. Google Android units carry an analogous function known as Superior Safety Mode.
Wyden additionally urged the FBI to replace its coaching to advocate numerous different steps that individuals can take to make their cell units much less trackable, together with using advert blockers to protect in opposition to malicious ads, disabling advert monitoring IDs in cell units, and opting out of economic knowledge brokers (the suspect charged within the Minnesota shootings reportedly used a number of people-search providers to search out the house addresses of his targets).
The senator’s letter notes that whereas the FBI has really useful all the above precautions in varied advisories issued over time, the recommendation the company is giving now to the nation’s leaders must be extra complete, actionable and pressing.
“Despite the seriousness of the risk, the FBI has but to offer efficient defensive steerage,” Wyden stated.
Nicholas Weaver is a researcher with the Worldwide Pc Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Weaver stated Lockdown Mode or Superior Safety will mitigate many vulnerabilities, and must be the default setting for all members of Congress and their workers.
“Lawmakers are at distinctive danger and must be exceptionally protected,” Weaver stated. “Their computer systems must be locked down and nicely administered, and so forth. And the identical applies to staffers.”
Weaver famous that Apple’s Lockdown Mode has a observe report of blocking zero-day assaults on iOS functions; in September 2023, Citizen Lab documented how Lockdown Mode foiled a zero-click flaw able to putting in adware on iOS units with none interplay from the sufferer.
Earlier this month, Citizen Lab researchers documented a zero-click assault used to contaminate the iOS units of two journalists with Paragon’s Graphite adware. The vulnerability may very well be exploited merely by sending the goal a booby-trapped media file delivered through iMessage. Apple additionally not too long ago up to date its advisory for the zero-click flaw (CVE-2025-43200), noting that it was mitigated as of iOS 18.3.1, which was launched in February 2025.
Apple has not commented on whether or not CVE-2025-43200 may very well be exploited on units with Lockdown Mode turned on. However HelpNetSecurity noticed that on the similar time Apple addressed CVE-2025-43200 again in February, the corporate mounted one other vulnerability flagged by Citizen Lab researcher Invoice Marczak: CVE-2025-24200, which Apple stated was utilized in a particularly subtle bodily assault in opposition to particular focused people that allowed attackers to disable USB Restricted Mode on a locked gadget.
In different phrases, the flaw may apparently be exploited provided that the attacker had bodily entry to the focused susceptible gadget. And because the previous infosec business adage goes, if an adversary has bodily entry to your gadget, it’s almost definitely not your gadget anymore.
I can’t converse to Google’s Superior Safety Mode personally, as a result of I don’t use Google or Android units. However I’ve had Apple’s Lockdown Mode enabled on all of my Apple units because it was first made obtainable in September 2022. I can solely consider a single event when one in every of my apps did not work correctly with Lockdown Mode turned on, and in that case I used to be ready so as to add a short lived exception for that app in Lockdown Mode’s settings.
My major gripe with Lockdown Mode was captured in a March 2025 column by TechCrunch’s Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai, who wrote about its penchant for periodically sending mystifying notifications that somebody has been blocked from contacting you, though nothing then prevents you from contacting that particular person straight. This has occurred to me no less than twice, and in each instances the particular person in query was already an authorized contact, and stated that they had not tried to achieve out.
Though it could be good if Apple’s Lockdown Mode despatched fewer, much less alarming and extra informative alerts, the occasional baffling warning message is hardly sufficient to make me flip it off.
