Plus: An “AI granny” is wasting scammers’ time, a lawsuit goes after spyware-maker NSO Group’s executives, and North Korea–linked hackers take a crack at macOS malware.

In perhaps the most adorable hacker story of the year, a trio of technologists in India found an innovative way to circumvent Apple’s location restrictions on AirPod Pro 2s so they could enable the earbuds’ hearing aid feature for their grandmas. The hack involved a homemade Faraday cage, a microwave, and a lot of trial and error.

On the other end of the tech-advancements spectrum, the US military is currently testing an AI-enabled machine gun that is capable of auto-targeting swarms of drones. The Bullfrog, built by Allen Control Systems, is one of several advanced weapons technologies in the works to combat the growing threat of cheap, small drones on the battlefield.

The US Department of Justice announced this week that an 18-year-old from California has admitted to making or orchestrating more than 375 swatting 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. WIRED has covered the dangers of government surveillance for decades, of course. But when the president-elect is explicitly threatening to jail his political enemies—whoever that may be—now’s probably a good time to brush up on your digital best practices.

In addition to potential dragnet surveillance of US citizens, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement started ramping up its surveillance arsenal the day after Trump won reelection. Meanwhile, experts are expecting the incoming administration to roll back cybersecurity rules instituted under president Joe Biden while taking a harder line against adversarial state-sponsored hackers. And if all this political upheaval has you in the mood to protest, beware: An investigation copublished by WIRED and The Marshall Project found that mask bans instituted in several states add a complicated new layer to exercising freedom of speech.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

In August 2016, approximately 120,000 bitcoin—at the time worth around $71 million—were stolen in a hack on the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. Then in 2022, as the value of cryptocurrency had rocketed skywards, law enforcement officials in New York arrested husband and wife Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan in relation to the hack and laundering the much-inflated $4.5 billion of stolen cryptocurrency. (At the time, $3.6 billion of the funds were recouped by law enforcement investigators.)

This week, after pleading guilty in 2023, Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years of jail time for conducting the hack and laundering the profits. With subsequent cryptocurrency spikes and additional seizures related to the hack, the US government has now been able to recover more than $10 billion in assets. A series of operational security failures by Lichtenstein made much of the illicit cryptocurrency easy for officials to seize, but investigators also applied sophisticated crypto-tracing methods to unpick how the funds had been stolen and subsequently moved around.

Aside from the brazen scale of the heist, Lichtenstein and Morgan gained online prominence and ridicule after their arrests due to a series of Forbes articles written by Morgan and rap videos posted to YouTube under the name of “Razzlekhan.” Morgan, who also pleaded guilty, is due to be sentenced on November 18.

**An ‘AI Granny’ Is Wasting Phone Scammers’ Time**

Scammers are increasingly adopting AI as part of their criminal toolkits—using the technology to create deepfakes, translate scripts, and make their operations more efficient. But artificial intelligence is also being turned against the scammers. British telecoms firm Virgin Media and its mobile operator O2 have created a new “AI granny” that can answer phone calls from scammers and keep them talking. The system uses different AI models, according to The Register, that listen to what a scammer says and respond immediately. In one case, the company says it kept a scammer on the line for 40 minutes and has fed others fake personal information. Unfortunately, the system (at least at the moment) can’t directly answer calls made to your phone; instead, O2 created a specific phone number for the system, which the company says it has managed to get placed in lists of numbers that scammers call.

**Alleged NSO Group Spyware Victim Adds NSO Founders and Executive to Lawsuit**

In a new legal strategy for those attempting to hold commercial spyware vendors responsible, lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, who was allegedly hacked with NSO Group spyware, is directly accusing two of the company’s founders, Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio, and one of its executives, Yuval Somekh, of hacking crimes in a lawsuit. The Barcelona-based human rights nonprofit Iridia announced this week that it filed the complaint in a Catalan court. Van den Eynde was reportedly a victim of a hacking campaign that used NSO’s notorious Pegasus spyware against at least 65 Catalans. Van den Eynde and Iridia originally sued NSO Group in a Barcelona court in 2022 along with affiliates Osy Technologies and Q Cyber Technologies. “The people responsible for NSO Group have to 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.

**North Korea-Backed Hackers Are Exploring New macOS Malware**

Research published this week by the mobile device management firm Jamf found that hackers who have been linked to North Korea have been working to implant malware inside macOS applications built with a particular open-source software development kit. The campaigns focused on cryptocurrency-related targets and involved infrastructure similar to systems that have been used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group. It’s unclear if the activity resulted in actual victim compromise or if it was still in a testing phase.

Financially motivated and state-backed hackers have less occasion to use malware targeting Apple’s Mac computers than hacking tools that infect Microsoft Windows or Linux desktops and servers. So when Mac malware crops up, it’s typically a niche point, but it can also be a revealing indicator of trends and priorities among hackers.

Bitfinex Hacker Gets 5 Years for $10 Billion Bitcoin Heist

Experts expect Donald Trump’s next administration to relax cybersecurity rules on businesses, abandon concerns around human rights, and take an aggressive stance against the cyber armies of US adversaries.

For American companies grousing about new cybersecurity rules, spyware firms eager to expand their global business, and hackers trying to break AI systems, Donald Trump’s second term as president will be a breath of fresh air.

For nearly four years, president Joe Biden’s administration has tried to make powerful US tech firms and infrastructure operators more responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity posture, as well as restrict the spread of spyware, apply guardrails to AI, and combat online misinformation. But when Trump takes office in January, he will almost certainly eliminate or significantly curtail those programs in favor of cyber strategies that benefit business interests, downplay human-rights concerns, and emphasize aggressive offense against the cyber armies of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

“There will be a national security focus, with a strong emphasis on protecting critical infrastructure, government networks, and key industries from cyber threats,” says Brian Harrell, who served as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s assistant director for infrastructure security during Trump’s first term.

From projects whose days are numbered to areas where Trump will go further than Biden, here is what a second Trump administration will likely mean for US cybersecurity policy.

**Full Reversal**

The incoming Trump administration is likely to scrap Biden’s ambitious effort to impose cyber regulations on sectors of US infrastructure that currently lack meaningful digital-security safeguards. That effort has borne fruit with railroads, pipelines, and aviation but has hit hurdles in sectors like water and health care.

Despite mounting cyberattacks targeting vital systems—and despite this year’s Republican Party platform promising to “raise the security standards for our critical systems and networks”—conservatives are unlikely to support new regulatory mandates on infrastructure operators.

There will be “no more regulation without explicit congressional authorization,” says James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Harrell says “more regulation will be dismantled than introduced.” Biden’s presidency was “riddled with new cyber regulation” that sometimes confused and overburdened industry, he adds. “The new White House will be looking to reduce regulatory burdens while streamlining smart compliance.”

This approach may not last, according to a US cyber official who requested anonymity to discuss politically sensitive issues. “I think they’ll eventually recognize that the efforts focused on regulation in cyber are needed to ensure the security of our critical infrastructure.”

“Regulation is the only tool that works,” Lewis says.

Some Biden cyber rules might be overturned in court, now that the Supreme Court has eliminated the deference that judges previously gave to agencies in disputes over their regulations. John Miller, senior vice president of policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, a major tech trade group, says it’s also possible that Trump officials “might not wait for the courts” to void those rules.

Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, predicts that the Trump administration will emphasize cooperation and incentives in its efforts to protect vulnerable industries. He points to a House GOP plan for water cybersecurity standards as an example.

Trump’s election also likely spells doom for CISA’s work to counter mis- and disinformation, especially around elections. After Trump lost the 2020 election, he fired CISA’s first director for debunking right-wing election conspiracy theories, and the conservative backlash to anti-misinformation work has only grown since then.

In 2022, Trump outlined a “free speech policy initiative” to “break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information.’” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X whom Trump has tapped to colead a “government efficiency” initiative, enthusiastically shared the plan last week.

CISA has already dramatically scaled back its efforts to combat online falsehoods following a right-wing pressure campaign, but Trump appointees are almost certain to smother what remains of that mission. “Disinformation efforts will be eliminated,” Montgomery predicts.

Harrell agrees that Trump would “refocus” CISA on core cyber initiatives, saying the agency’s “priorities have mistakenly bordered on social issues lately.”

Also likely on the chopping block: elements of Biden’s artificial intelligence safety agenda that focus on AI’s social harms, like bias and discrimination, as well as Biden’s requirement for large AI developers to report to the government about their model training.

“I expect the repeal of Biden’s executive order on AI, specifically because of its references to AI regulation,” says Nick Reese, a director of emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump and Biden. “We should expect a change in direction toward less regulation, which would mean less compulsory AI safety measures.”

Trump is also unlikely to continue the Biden administration’s campaign to limit the proliferation of commercial spyware technologies, which authoritarian governments have used to harass journalists, civil-rights protesters, and opposition politicians. Trump and his allies maintain close political and financial ties with two of the most prolific users of commercial spyware tools, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and he showed little concern about those governments’ human-rights abuses in his first term.

“There’s a high probability that we see big rollbacks on spyware policy,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. Trump officials are likely to care more about spyware makers’ counterterrorism arguments than about digital-rights advocates’ criticisms of those tools.

Spyware companies “will undoubtedly receive a more favorable audience under Trump,” Feldstein says—especially market leader NSO Group, which is closely affiliated with the Trump-aligned Israeli government.

**Dubious Prospects**

Other Biden cyber initiatives are also in jeopardy, even if their fates are not as clear.

Biden’s National Cybersecurity Strategy emphasized the need for greater corporate responsibility, arguing that well-resourced tech firms must do more to prevent hackers from abusing their products in devastating cyberattacks. Over the past few years, CISA launched a messaging campaign to encourage companies to make their products “secure by design,” the Justice Department created a Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative to prosecute contractors that mislead the government about their security practices, and White House officials began considering proposals to make software vendors liable for damaging vulnerabilities.

That corporate-accountability push is unlikely to receive strong support from the incoming Trump administration, which is almost certain to be stocked with former business leaders hostile to government pressure.

Henry Young, senior director of policy at the software trade group BSA, predicts that the secure-by-design campaign will “evolve to more realistically balance the responsibilities of governments, businesses, and customers, and hopefully eschew finger pointing in favor of collaborative efforts to continue to improve security and resilience.”

A Democratic administration might have used the secure-by-design push as a springboard to new corporate regulations. Under Trump, secure-by-design will remain at most a rhetorical slogan. “Turning it into something more tangible will be the challenge,” the US cyber official says.

**Chipping Away at the Edges**

One landmark cyber program can’t easily be scrapped under a second Trump administration but could still be dramatically transformed.

In 2022, Congress passed a law requiring CISA to create cyber incident reporting regulations for critical infrastructure operators. CISA released the text of the proposed regulations in April, sparking an immediate backlash from industry groups that said it went too far. Corporate America warned that CISA was asking too many companies for too much information about too many incidents.

Trump’s election could throw a wrench in CISA’s ambitious incident-reporting plans. New appointees at the White House, DHS, and CISA itself could force agency staff to rewrite the rules to be more industry-friendly, exempting entire swaths of critical infrastructure or eliminating requirements for companies to report certain data. Trump’s team has months to revise the final rule before its required publication in late 2025.

BSA’s Young expects Trump’s team to scale back the regulations, which he says “take a very broad view of the authority CISA believes Congress granted it.”

The current rule is “particularly vulnerable to a court challenge” because it exceeds Congress’s intent, ITI’s Miller warns, and Trump’s team “may direct CISA to scale it back” if the agency doesn’t “proceed cautiously” on its own.

**New Urgency**

One area where Trump might pick up the baton from the Biden administration is the government’s use of military hacking operations and its response to foreign adversaries’ cyberattacks.

Under Biden, the military’s US Cyber Command has scaled up its overseas hacker-hunting engagements with allies. But Republicans have pressed Biden to respond more muscularly to Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hacks, and Trump is likely to embrace that approach—particularly after picking representative Mike Waltz, an advocate for cyberattacks on Russia, North Korea, and Mexican cartels, as his national security adviser.

“A much more aggressive stance will be taken against China, which is sorely needed,” Harrell says, predicting that Chinese hackers penetrating US critical infrastructure “will be held to account.”

Montgomery agrees that Trump may “adopt a more aggressive approach” to national cyber defense, including giving the National Guard “a more significant role” in protecting domestic infrastructure.

Montgomery also says he expects more frequent and more muscular offensive operations by Cyber Command, which Trump elevated to a full combatant command during his first term. He predicts the Trump administration will “look more favorably” on creating a separate military cyber service, which the Biden administration opposed, and “take a more skeptical view” of the joint leadership of Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, which the Biden administration supported.

Trump could also harness other tools to constrain China, including authorities he created during his first term to block the use of risky technology in the US. “The Trump administration will look at the full set of policy levers when deciding how to push back on China in cyberspace,” says Kevin Allison, a consultant on geopolitics and technology.

More Spyware, Fewer Rules: What Trump’s Return Means for US Cybersecurity

Alan Filion, believed to have operated under the handle “Torswats,” admitted to making more than 375 fake threats against schools, places of worship, and government buildings around the United States.

In perhaps the largest swatting case to ever be prosecuted, an 18-year-old from Lancaster, California, has pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from a nationwide spree of hundreds of shooting and bomb threat hoaxes that sent police scrambling to high schools, courthouses, and the homes of law enforcement officials and prominent politicians.

Alan Winston Filion now faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each of four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, according to the United States Department of Justice.

Early this year, Filion was arrested and extradited to Seminole County, Florida. At the time, state prosecutors charged Filion with four state-level felony counts stemming from a single incident in which, prosecutors allege, Filion told a Sanford Police Department dispatcher that he was armed with pipe bombs and an AR-15 rifle and was walking into Masjid Al Hayy Mosque to kill everyone he saw.

Filion, whom authorities believe operated online as “Torswats,” has been in jail without a trial for nearly a year. He entered a plea of not guilty to the state charges.

The federal charges announced on Wednesday, along with interviews from people connected to the investigation—and Filion himself—allege his swatting activities reached far beyond Florida’s borders.

Between approximately August 2022 to January 2024 Filion made more than 375 swatting calls, according to the plea agreement. These included incidents where he claimed to have planted bombs or threatened to conduct mass shootings at targeted locations that included religious institutions, high schools, and historically black colleges and universities.

“This prosecution and today’s guilty plea reaffirm the Justice Department’s commitment to using all tools to hold accountable every individual who endangers our communities through swatting and hoax threats,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said in a statement. “For well over a year, Alan Filion targeted religious institutions, schools, government officials, and other innocent victims with hundreds of false threats of imminent mass shootings, bombings, and other violent crimes. He caused profound fear and chaos and will now face the consequences of his actions.”

According to court records, Filion was also part of a high-profile international swatting group that targeted several prominent figures between December 2023 and January 2024. Among the victims were US Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, Republican US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida. Investigators say they linked the scheme to roughly 100 calls, one of which targeted an unnamed former president of the United States.

In August, the Department of Justice charged two European men, Tomasz Szabo and Nemanja Radovanovic, in connection with the widespread swatting operation, which led to at least one car accident with injuries. During interviews with the US Secret Service in January and February, both men admitted their roles in the scheme. Radovanovic, however, claimed that he was directed by a third party who provided detailed scripts and selected the targets.

According to the plea agreement, Filion admitted to orchestrating the operation, supplying the names, addresses, and phone numbers of many of the targeted individuals.

“I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man identifying himself as "James" said in one such call. He told dispatchers in Georgia that he caught his wife sleeping with another man and, after killing her, had taken the man hostage. “I’ll release him for $10,000 in cash,” he added, threatening to detonate pipe bombs and blow up the house if his demands weren’t met. This call targeted the home of Georgia state senator John Albers.

The case against Filion, first reported by WIRED, was built on a trail of digital evidence left across platforms like Telegram, YouTube, and Discord, and pieced together by Brad “Cafrozed” Dennis, a private investigator. Dennis had been hired by two high-profile Twitch stars, both victims of Torswats’ calls, to find the person responsible.

For months, Dennis had posed online as a vengeful ex-husband looking to troll and harass his former wife. He used this persona to infiltrate private Discord servers and Telegram groups where Torswats and affiliates hung out. These were chats dedicated to extortion plots and racist memes; channels filled with child sexual abuse material, self-harm, and animal abuse—some of the worst content he'd ever seen, Dennis told WIRED.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Dennis sent Torswats a private message on Telegram: “You wanna make some real cash? Add me on Tox,” he wrote, referring to the peer-to-peer messaging service, under the pretense of arranging a swatting.

Using network monitoring tools, Dennis then captured the IP address linked to the Torswats account and uncovered a new username: "Paimon Arnum." In January 2023, Dennis handed this critical piece of evidence, along with other usernames and active Discord servers he had tracked over several months, over to the FBI.

According to emails reviewed by WIRED, that information was central to how the FBI broke the case and was the basis of subpoenas sent to Discord and Google in April of 2023 seeking information on accounts Dennis had identified. By early May, the FBI had successfully pinpointed Torswats’ identity and location.

That month, Torswats privately took responsibility for swatting incidents in Telegram chats reviewed by WIRED. These incidents affected up to 25 schools in Washington state, impacting approximately 18,116 students and costing taxpayers an estimated $271,173 in lost instructional time, according to Don Beeler, CEO of TDR Technology Solutions, a company specializing in school surveillance and threat analysis.

Additionally, 911 audio and other police records obtained by WIRED corroborate that the same individual made the calls for more than a dozen of these swatting incidents. In some instances, the caller told dispatchers he had been commanded by Satan to kill students. In others, he said he had been mistreated because he was gay. In others, he seemed to have become bored enough with the game that he didn’t bother to make up a reason.

On July 12, the Torswats handle announced a new swatting operation dubbed the “Grand Offensive,” targeting a dozen senators. Three days later, the FBI raided Filion’s home and seized his electronic devices.

But the raid didn’t stop the swatting.

On November 6, 2023, someone using the Torswats handle took responsibility for a bomb threat aimed at North Beach High School in Ocean Shores, Washington, through a Telegram message. According to police reports and call records obtained by WIRED, the caller impersonated a drug dealer who wanted to report his client to the police because he had said he had placed pipe bombs around the school and was planning a mass shooting. That same month, a person going by Torswats also admitted to swatting an investigator and cybercrime expert named Keven Hendricks in private Telegram communications.

Both threats could be attributed to the same individual, according to a law enforcement official who reviewed the recordings for WIRED but requested anonymity because they were unauthorized to speak to the press.

Details about Filion’s life outside his online activities remain sparse. Enrollment records from Lancaster’s Antelope Valley Community College show that Filion began pursuing a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022. A former classmate, who requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation, described Filion as quiet and “forgettable.”

“He didn’t appear to have many friends,” they said.

In January 2024, an individual affiliated with the Torswats Telegram account and claiming to be a friend of Filion suggested that he was part of a group aiming to incite racial violence and that he sought money to “buy weapons and commit a mass shooting.” The allegation aligns with a written tip, placed to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in April 2023 and obtained by WIRED, alleging that the person behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles.

“He believes he is doing his part to bring about the end of days by ‘bleeding the finances and man hours of the system,’” the tipster wrote.

Filion’s family could not be immediately reached for comment. A sentencing date for the teenager has not yet been set.

_Updated at 10:45 am EST, November, 2024: Added additional details about Filion’s involvement in swatting attacks against prominent US government officials and others._

Teen Behind Hundreds of Swatting Attacks Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges

Three technologists in India used a homemade Faraday cage and a microwave oven to get around Apple’s location blocks.

When Apple released a software update at the start of November that enabled its new hearing aid features in AirPods Pro 2 earbuds, Rithwik Jayasimha immediately went out with his dad to buy a pair for his grandma. “We came back home, we took them out of the case, and I was looking for the feature and it was just missing,” Jayasimha says. India, where Jayasimha and his family live, is not one of the many countries where Apple’s hearing aid features are available. “It was a huge bummer,” Jayasimha says.

Instead of abandoning the headphones, Jayasimha and two friends, Arnav Bansal and Rithvik Vibhu—both of whom say they have grandmas who use hearing aids as well—hacked a way to bypass Apple’s location restrictions and enable their hearing aids in Bangalore.

To dodge Apple’s geolocation restrictions, the trio built a rudimentary, signal-blocking Faraday cage on top of a microwave with aluminum foil, which ultimately allowed them to enable the hearing aid settings. “We don’t even think it’s Apple’s fault. The feature is amazing,” Jayasimha says.

One of the older hearing aids that was replaced with an Apple’s AirPods Pro 2.Photograph: Lagrange Point/Rithwik Jayasimha

The group members, who have a mix of hardware and software skills and first detailed their hack as part of a technology collective called Lagrange Point, say a couple of dozen people have contacted them asking for help with their AirPods. “We’ve got a huge amount of interest from folks in India who have these AirPods or whose grandparents need them and they’ve not been able to use them,” Jayasimha says. Others have documented the same issue in social media posts.

The researchers demonstrated that they could bypass Apple’s geographic restrictions with a set of AirPods Pro 2 connected to a 10th generation Wi-Fi-only iPad. They note that it would be possible to do the workaround on an iPhone or iPad connected to a mobile carrier as well, but it would be more involved.

To find the workaround, the researchers first looked at the different ways that iOS establishes where a device is in the world. For Wi-Fi-only devices, there are a few checks. The server looks at which Apple Store region the device is connected to, as well as the time zone, language, and region the device is set to. Additionally, the operating system sends a simple web request to an Apple web service that then responds with the country code of the country the device appears to be in based on the location associated with its IP address.

The researchers first tried manually changing the time zone and region settings for the iPad, but it ultimately wasn’t clear whether this impacted their ability to hide the iPad’s true location. When masking the iPad’s IP address so it would appear to be connected in the United States didn’t work, the researchers assessed other metrics the device might be using to establish its geographic location. It turns out that iOS also examines Wi-Fi “service set identifiers,” or SSIDs, that help devices connect to the right Wi-Fi network when there are many network signals in the air—like in an apartment building or at a coffee shop.

The operating system also uses GPS triangulation and device identifier “MAC addresses” of nearby devices, including routers, to establish a device’s location. In other words, even if a person in Bangalore uses a proxy to make it seem like their iPad has a US-based IP address, all the nearby routers and devices are associated with India-located IP addresses that give the real location away.

To deal with this, the researchers rigged up a Faraday cage, which blocks electromagnetic signals, to isolate the iPad from the other devices and wireless networks around it. They built their aluminum-foil-clad enclosure on top of a regular kitchen microwave and then turned on the microwave whenever they wanted to block signals to the iPad. The setup worked because consumer microwaves heat food using electromagnetic waves that are at the same frequency as Wi-Fi signals—2.4 GHz. Essentially, the researchers had turned their microwave oven into a Wi-Fi jammer.

The hackers first built a Faraday cage using a cardboard box and several sheets of aluminum foil, and placed it on top of a microwave to further block wireless signals.Photograph: Lagrange Point/Rithwik Jayasimha

“We put several layers of aluminum inside and outside \[a cardboard box\] and we’d see some signal strength drop,” Bansal says. “Of course, it’s not going to be great, but combined with the microwave, it worked.”

Ultimately, the researchers designed a less ingenious, but simpler and more reliable Faraday cage to make their manipulation more practical. With the iPad placed in its own shielded bubble, the researchers used an open source Wi-Fi location database and Wi-Fi SSID cycling tool to trick iOS into locating the iPad in California. With this complete, the AirPods could work as hearing aids in India.

Apple offers the hearing aid features in more than 100 countries, and it has great promise as a tool for making hearing aid tech more accessible—and more palatable—to millions of people around the world. But the company isn’t able to offer the feature everywhere and restricts access in certain countries, like India, likely because of regulatory hurdles related to medical devices. The fact that it’s possible to circumvent these restrictions may offer a solution, at least temporarily, for people in blocked countries who are looking for a workaround.

Apple did not return WIRED’s request for comment about the findings, but the researchers note that it seems like it would be possible for Apple to close the loophole they discovered fairly easily. They say they haven’t heard from the company.

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says their work is “very interesting” and demonstrates how there may often be ways around “safeguards” put in place by Big Tech. “It shows that those with the technical understanding can bypass the geofencing of apps relatively simply,” Woodward says. “Not that everyone could do it, but they probably know someone that can.”

“I’m not sure how many people realize the number of variants in something like iOS even on what is apparently the same version—the build number is what really matters,” Woodward says. “It’s more a lesson to people that you have more than you realize on your phone.”

The second version of the Faraday cage, which the researchers plan to use to run more experiments.Photograph: Lagrange Point/Rithwik Jayasimha

Services offered by Big Tech companies such as Apple and Google often have had staggered launches around the world as lawmakers have introduced regulations to control technology companies’ power and protect people’s rights. In the EU, for instance, several AI products have been delayed or not launched due to strict privacy laws. Apple has also been required to allow alternative App Stores due to EU rules. At the same time, right-to-repair movements have grown in popularity, and people have increasingly been hacking into the products they buy.

While the three researchers in India believe that it is likely Apple’s hearing aid features will officially come to the country in the coming months, they plan in the meantime to help the dozens of people they say have reached out to them about their own headphones. They also plan on using the second version of the Faraday cage to set up people’s AirPods. From their own grandmas’ experiences, the hearing aid features appear to be valuable in their everyday lives.

Bansal says his grandma has some hearing loss and other health challenges, but has typically worn hearing aids while watching television. “She used to wear her old clunky hearing aids, and they were really problematic because they had these tiny little buttons on them,” Bansal says. “But now she uses the AirPods, we’ve set it up with her hearing profile, and she can use it to watch the TV just fine and it’s a lot nicer. She doesn’t feel like a patient wearing it.”

These Guys Hacked AirPods to Give Their Grandmas Hearing Aids

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement put out a fresh call for contracts for surveillance technologies before an anticipated surge in the number of people it monitors ahead of deportation hearings.

On November 6, just hours after news outlets declared that Donald Trump had been elected the next president of the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a notice asking companies to submit plans for how they would expand ICE’s system of ankle monitors, GPS trackers, biometric check-in technology, and human agents monitoring “non-citizens” awaiting immigration court hearings or deportation.

The notice signals the mechanisms through which ICE will expand its intensive surveillance of people awaiting deportation hearings—a list that could grow from under 200,000 to more than 5 million.

Throughout Trump’s presidential campaign, he has promised to execute “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Beyond promising workplace raids and giant detention “camps,” Trump hasn’t released specific plans for how his mass deportations would work. However, it’s likely that many granular aspects of a mass monitoring, detention, and deportation program would be planned by private companies contracting with ICE.

ICE’s recent notice asks interested companies to send specific details about how they would store location data and personal information, where their office locations would be, how they would staff agents, and what technology they have for remote surveillance, among other details. Currently, ICE uses a combination of ankle monitors and GPS-enabled smartwatches and smartphone apps to remotely monitor people. It also uses apps with facial recognition for “biometric” check-ins.

The notice says companies must have facilities with “suitably large intake rooms” for people being enrolled in ICE surveillance. They also must have the “ability to perform mass-scale intakes as required by unforeseeable events.”

Contractors would be facilitating ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which is a way for ICE to monitor these undocumented or unnaturalized people without placing them in a detention facility. ISAP is meant especially for people who have been in the United States for some period of time and already have a house, apartment, or other residence. ISAP has flourished under President Biden, who has more than doubled the number of participants since December 2020, putting the current total at almost 200,000 people.

For ICE, according to the November notice, the program offers “considerable cost savings” compared to detention. So even if Trump follows through on his promise of mass detention, it’s likely that ISAP would be a significant aspect of any mass deportation program.

Compared to its recent November notice, ICE was more detailed about its 2025 plans in a different notice released last year. This earlier notice shows that ICE was preparing for a more intense immigration policy on the horizon regardless of who eventually won the election.

In the 2023 notice, ICE says that ISAP’s parent program, Alternatives to Detention, would be rebranded as Release and Reporting Management. This new program would involve monitoring every single non-detained person who’s awaiting a court hearing or deportation, as opposed to just some. At the time the notice was published, ICE said 5.7 million people were eligible to be monitored under the new program—meaning that if implemented, the scale of ICE’s remote surveillance would increase by approximately 3,000 percent.

According to a government contract database, B.I. Incorporated has been ICE’s ISAP contractor since at least 2005. The company is a subsidiary of GEO Group, which is one of the largest private prison companies in the US.

Though the stock market as a whole went up the day after Trump’s victory, GEO Group’s stock boost made it “the single biggest winner in the US stock market—among companies of any size,” according to Robinhood-owned investment news site Sherwood News. Its five-year contract to run ISAP, worth $2.2 billion, is scheduled to expire next year.

On a post-election earnings call for GEO Group, CEO Brian Evans said that the company could increase its ISAP capacity by “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary,” as reported by HuffPo. The company’s COO, Wayne Calabrese, added that they have already informed ICE that it’s ready to do this.

“We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more expansive approach to monitoring the several millions of individuals who are currently on the non-detained immigrant docket,” Calabrese said on the call.

According to HuffPo, GEO Group competitor CoreCivic (previously called Corrections Corporation of America) had its own post-election earnings call, during which CEO Damon Hininger said that the timing of the November 6 ICE notice was “probably not a coincidence.”

“We took that as a very encouraging sign,” Hininger said.

ICE Started Ramping Up Its Surveillance Arsenal Immediately After Donald Trump Won

Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions and jail his enemies. To carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital surveillance machine. Here are some steps you can take to evade it.

The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance

Privacy advocates worry banning masks at protests will encourage harassment, while cops’ high-tech tools render the rules unnecessary.

“There are lots of different tools that are available to law enforcement. Facial recognition is one of those tools that it's about expediency,” said Nicole Napolitano, director of research at the Center for Policing Equity. But it’s not without its pitfalls. Like PimEyes, tools like Clearview AI can make mistakes and incorrectly identify people, leading to erroneous arrests. “Police have become increasingly reliant on and then biased by what the model tells them,” said Napolitano.

“There's no constitutional right to cover your face in public,” charged Meyers, the Manhattan Institute’s policing director.

Indeed, the legal landscape surrounding how law enforcement can use surveillance technologies has been hazy, explained Beth Haroules, a staff attorney for the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, largely because the law hasn’t kept up with the pace with technological development.

For Haroules, the potential for omnipresent surveillance means people never really have a reasonable expectation of privacy—an important historic legal standard. “\[Surveillance\] cameras aren't just the eyes of a police officer,” she said. “They are being monitored, perhaps 24/7, in real time. They're feeding images into artificial intelligence, aided by algorithms that then kick out and match you to a number of faces and places that you've been.”

That legal haze, though, may finally be starting to clear.

This summer, a federal appeals court judge declared that geofence warrants were violations of the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, though this decision only holds in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Similarly, a New York judge ruled warrantless phone searches at border crossings are unconstitutional. While the ruling only applies to a portion of New York, it does cover John F. Kennedy International Airport, one of the country’s busiest airports.

Phone manufacturers have also been making strides with regard to technological solutions to subvert surveillance methods. Google announced changes to how it stores users’ location data, making it unable to comply with future geofence warrants.

Even so, determining when police use surveillance technology can be difficult. Tushar Jois, a City College of New York professor studying the intersection of privacy, technology, and censorship, said that police departments “would routinely drop evidence in their cases rather than share data” about their surveillance technology use.

Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech-focused civil liberties nonprofit, said that many of the things law enforcement officials used to only dream of are now increasingly possible.

“I think there's been a big shift in how we need to think about what it means to have an expectation of privacy in a public space,” Lipton said.

Half a century ago, Lipton explained, you'd potentially be able to see someone following you down the street, listening to your conversation. Now, that type of surveillance isn't so obvious.

“That's something we, as a country, really need to reevaluate,” she added. “We don't want to be in a position, either as protesters, or just as regular individuals, trying to live a life where we're essentially being followed and listened to all the time.”

The Real Problem With Banning Masks at Protests

The Pentagon is pursuing every available option to keep US troops safe from the rising tide of adversary drones, including a robotic twist on its standard-issue small arms.

Amid a rising tide of low-cost weaponized adversary drones menacing American troops abroad, the US military is pulling out all the stops to protect its forces from the ever-present threat of death from above. But between expensive munitions, futuristic but complicated directed energy weapons, and its own growing drone arsenal, the Pentagon is increasingly eyeing an elegantly simple solution to its growing drone problem: reinventing the gun.

At the Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) event in August, the US Defense Department tested an artificial intelligence-enabled autonomous robotic gun system developed by fledgling defense contractor Allen Control Systems dubbed the “Bullfrog.”

Consisting of a 7.62-mm M240 machine gun mounted on a specially designed rotating turret outfitted with an electro-optical sensor, proprietary AI, and computer vision software, the Bullfrog was designed to deliver small arms fire on drone targets with far more precision than the average US service member can achieve with a standard-issue weapon like the M4 carbine or next-generation XM7 rifle. Indeed, footage of the Bullfrog in action published by ACS shows the truck-mounted system locking onto small drones and knocking them out of the sky with just a few shots.

The Bullfrog appears effective enough against drone targets to impress DOD officials: According to Defense Daily, Alex Lovett, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for prototyping and experimentation within the Pentagon’s Research and Engineering office, told reporters at a demonstration event in August that the testing of the “low-cost” Bullfrog solution had “gone really well.” Should the Pentagon adopt the system, it would represent the first publicly known lethal autonomous weapon in the US military’s arsenal, according to the Congressional Research Service. (The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not yet respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)

Shooting down small, fast-moving drones with conventional firearms is a significant challenge to even the most talented marksman, and the US military has been pursuing various ways to make its small arms more effective against unmanned airborne threats. Those efforts include the procurement of small- to medium-caliber munitions and “buckshot-like” ammo that can replicate the effects of the shotguns that have proven effective counter-drone measures amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; rifle-mounted radio frequency and GPS jammers to disorient incoming drones so troops don’t have to carry separate, bulky counter-drone weapons like the Dronebuster or NightFighter; and “smart” optics from companies like SmartShooter and ZeroMark that purportedly only allow a weapon to fire when it locks on target. The Army has even started integrating counter-drone exercises into its basic training regimen, part of a broader effort to make such schooling as “routine” as conventional marksmanship training.

For ACS cofounder and CEO Steve Simoni, a former Navy nuclear engineer, the best way to optimize a firearm for drone threats isn’t through novel accessories or enhanced training, but a combination of advanced robotics and a sophisticated AI that can take the guesswork out of target acquisition and tracking.

“During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we \[Simoni and his ACS cofounder, fellow Navy veteran Luke Allen\] saw the proliferation of drones on both sides of the conflict, and we read in various news outlets the Ukrainians were firing AK-47s in the air at them,” Simoni tells WIRED. “We thought, ‘That’s a good robotics problem.’ It's hard to hit something flying so fast, but a robot can do that with modern-day computer vision and AI control algorithms.”

While smart optics like SmartShooter’s SMASH fire control system also use AI and computer vision to track potential targets, Simoni believes that physically keeping a rifle zeroed in on a fast-moving drone is a more significant challenge than even a highly trained human soldier with an advanced weapon-mounted scope is equipped to address. The solution, Simoni says, is to remove humans from the equation altogether and allow an extremely precise, custom-built motion control system to maintain a steady bead on an incoming drone amid the chaos of a battlefield.

“We are electrical engineers, and we decided that in order to solve this problem of hitting a fast drone that's accelerating at five Gs at a couple hundred yards, you would need an incredibly high-end current that goes through a motor and encoders that know the position of your gun at all times,” Simoni says. “To put that form factor in the hands of someone with an M4 seemed like a very tough problem.”

“A DJI Mini \[drone\] is a little bit bigger than my hand, and our system can down one at 200 yards with two shots,” he adds. “No human could make that shot.”

The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the Threat Systems Management Office operate a swarm of 40 drones to test the rotational units' capabilities during the battle of Razish, National Training Center in 2019.

Photograph Courtesy of the U.S. Army / Pv2 James Newsome

Gun turrets are nothing new for the US military and its allies, from the manually operated Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS) that adorns a growing number of American ground combat vehicles to the beloved semi-autonomous Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) that’s essential to defending Navy warships from incoming missiles. More recently, the Army has experimented with several other gun-based counter-drone solutions—including a Ghost Robotics robot dog with its own AI-enabled AR/M4-pattern rifle turret.

At less than 400 pounds, the Bullfrog is smaller and simpler than the hulking 15-foot-tall, 12,000-plus-pound Phalanx CIWS and, in turn, better suited to provide flexible protection for individual platforms like, say, a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle on the move. And where the Phalanx CIWS sprays what essentially amounts to “a cloud of bullets,” Simoni claims the Bullfrog is precise enough to not only down airborne targets with minimal ammo expended, but deliver crossing shots at targets from the side, allowing the turret to accurately engage threats to units other than itself—and, with multiple systems, create a layered air defense network.

“Internally, we used to call the Bullfrog the ‘mini-CIWS,’” Simoni says. “But the CIWS control system isn’t as accurate.”

Then there’s the matter of the Bullfrog’s autonomy, a prickly subject for military planners. In accordance with the Pentagon’s current policy governing lethal autonomous weapons, the Bullfrog is designed to keep a human “in the loop” in order to avoid a potential “unauthorized engagement." In other words, the gun points at and follows targets, but does not fire until commanded to by a human operator. However, ACS officials claim that the system can operate totally autonomously should the US military require it to in the future, with sentry guns taking the entire kill chain out of the hands of service members and freeing them up to focus on other, more mission-essential tasks.

“Our system is fully autonomous-capable, we’re just waiting for the government to determine its needs,” Brice Cooper, ACS’s chief strategy officer and a Green Beret veteran who previously served as head of US Special Operations Command’s counter-drone program, tells WIRED. “Legacy systems in our category are just not there yet.”

A Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (CIWS) is tested aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island on Jan. 29, 2011.

Photograph Courtesy of the US Navy

The Bullfrog’s debut at T-REX couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time. The Pentagon recently announced the second increment of its Replicator initiative that was launched last year to catalyze a surge in US military drone and counter-drone capabilities ahead of potential future conflicts with “great power” threats like China or Russia. Where the first Replicator increment focused on rapidly procuring and fielding low-cost, attritable drones for US forces around the world, the second will tackle “the threat posed by small uncrewed aerial systems (C-sUAS) to our most critical installations and force concentrations,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put it in a late September letter announcing the new stage of the initiative.

American military commanders in the Middle East have for years maintained that cheap, easily weaponizable commercial drones represent the greatest threat to their deployed forces since the advent of the improvised explosive device during the Global War on Terror, a concern driven home by attacks on Navy warships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and US troop outposts in Iraq and Syria in the year following the outbreak of the current Israeli-Hamas conflict. In January, three US service members were killed in a drone attack on a military outpost in Jordan near the Syrian border, an incident that the Pentagon later determined had occurred because American forces there lacked the appropriate capabilities to defend against incoming drone threats.

“The threat landscape has become hyper-accelerated,” Cooper says. “A year ago, nobody was really concerned about the small drones that are destroying all kinds of armored vehicles in Ukraine. In reality, we're in the very nascent stages of what the unmanned threat landscape is going to look like, and it’s going to involve a serious investment from the Defense Department in perpetuity.”

It’s unclear at this time what specific types of counter-drone capabilities Replicator 2 might yield. At the moment, it appears that all options are on the table. They include remotely operated weapons turrets like the XM914 30-mm chain gun loaded up with explosive proximity rounds; missile systems like MSI’s Electronic Advanced Ground Launcher System (EAGLS) laser-guided rocket pod, L3Harris’s Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system, and Raytheon’s Coyote interceptor; “autonomous air vehicles” like the Air Force’s Paladin flying gun and the Roadrunner from defense upstart Anduril; vehicle-mounted sensor- and signal-jamming electronic warfare suites like the Marine Corps’ Light Marine Air-Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS) that’s been knocking drones out of the sky since 2019 and the Army’s Mobile Low, Slow Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defense System (M-LIDS) that was most recently deployed to protect the service’s temporary pier in Gaza, both of which also feature “kinetic effectors” like machine guns and missiles; exotic directed energy weapons like high-energy lasers and high-powered microwaves to disrupt and disable drone electronics mid-flight; and a growing arsenal of infantry weapons from counter-drone rifles to the tried-and-true FIM-92 Stinger man-portable air-defense system. These weapons are all intended to turn every service member in American combat formations into a “drone defender.”

US Army soldiers with Task Force Spartan conduct Mobile Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Integrated Defense System (M-LIDS) training at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, in 2022.

Photograph Courtesy of the US Army / Sgt. Gabriel Washington

One major factor driving the Pentagon’s counter-drone push, however, is cost. Many kill systems currently in use are still disproportionately expensive defense against comparatively cheap drones. And while directed-energy weapons like lasers and microwaves, at something like $10 a shot, offer a far more cost-effective solution than traditional munitions, they are also still relatively experimental (and incredibly complicated) technologies that, despite their ongoing testing and even active use in the Middle East, are not yet seen as reliable enough to field at scale.

“If something like \[the Bullfrog\] works where you can modify an existing system across the fleet, that's ideal,” Mike Clementi, a former congressional defense appropriator who previously worked on the US military’s counter-drone efforts, tells WIRED. “And if you can use it effectively for the cost of a handful of 7.62-mm rounds, you're getting ahead of the game.”

“The real question is: How do you eliminate massive amounts of cheap targets?” he adds. “If the Bullfrog pans out, it would be the cheapest solution out there.”

Simoni believes AI-powered autonomous gun systems like the Bullfrog can provide enough precision to deliver a cost-per-kill ratio similar to that associated with laser and microwave systems without the intensive maintenance and logistics upkeep. And while the Bullfrog isn’t the only counter-drone gun system on the Pentagon’s radar, Simoni believes that the algorithmic accuracy enabled by the turret’s unique machine-learning software and motion control system remains superior to that of other offerings.

“Tracking and shooting is only the tip of the iceberg: Eventually, the system will consist of different guns, reaching out to longer ranges, engaging drones that are moving in different acceleration patterns—that’s all based on updates to our AI model,” Simoni says. “We envision a convoy of vehicles outfitted with turrets employing coordinated fires that are effective even if they’re driving down a bumpy road. That’s what we’re building over the next 12 to 18 months.”

Regardless of Simoni’s ambitious vision and the Pentagon's recent push into the realm of autonomous weapons, questions still persist in defense circles about the potential dangers of taking a human operator out of the kill chain.

“Anything with robotics requires software to make the determination of friend or foe, and that's a concern with anything that's automated,” Clementi says. The use of fully automated systems would be “uncharted territory,” he says. “There's always been a person in the loop before.”

Should the Pentagon end up embracing an autonomous robotic gun system as its counter-drone defense of choice, the next big conflict involving American troops could end up looking like a joke from an episode of _The Simpsons_: “most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.”

“The future battlespace is incredible autonomous robots like ours shooting each other,” Simoni said. “I don’t think there's much room for people with guns.”

The AI Machine Gun of the Future Is Already Here

Plus: Hot Topic confirms a customer data breach, Germany arrests a US citizen for allegedly passing military secrets to Chinese intelligence, and more.

Maybe you already heard, but Donald Trump will be president of the United States again. The far-right is celebrating by calling for mass executions. The left is responding with their own election conspiracy theories. Convicted January 6 rioters are banking on a pardon. And women who oppose Trump have frankly had enough.

Ahead of Election Day, WIRED found that an “election integrity” app made by True the Vote, a right-wing group that helped popularize election denialism around the 2020 election, was leaking the emails of its users. In one instance it revealed an election officer in California who appeared to be engaged in illegal voter suppression.

Disinformation and other forms of election interference have been a major issue since Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee in the lead-up to the 2016 election. But 2024 appears to have been the worst yet, with US officials warning that Russia had amplified its efforts to unprecedented levels.

In non-election news, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander “Connor” Moucka, who is accused of hacking a slew of Snowflake cloud storage customers earlier this year. Security experts who’ve long followed the exploits of a hacker who went by the handle Waifu—whom authorities say is Moucka—believe him to be “one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024.”

A federal judge in Michigan sentenced Richard Densmore to 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a child. Densmore was highly active in 764, an online criminal network that the FBI now considers to be a “tier one” terrorism threat.

Finally, in WIRED’s first story published in partnership with 404 Media, reporter (and 404 co-owner) Joseph Cox took a deep dive into the world of infostealer malware—the same kind used in all those Snowflake account breaches Moucka is accused of committing.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Some iPhones that police have in their possession for forensic examination are suddenly rebooting themselves, making it more difficult for investigators to access their contents, reports 404 Media. Police use tools like Cellebrite to essentially hack into phones, but this is typically done when a device is in the so-called After First Unlock (AFU) state. Once they reboot, iPhones are put into Before First Unlock (BFU), which makes them much harder to access with forensic tools.

According to a document obtained by 404, police believed the sudden reboots stemmed from the fact that the devices run iOS 18, Apple’s new mobile operating system. The police suspected that iOS 18 contains a secret feature that allowed the impacted devices, all of which were in airplane mode, to communicate with other nearby iPhones, which sent “a signal to devices to reboot after so much time had transpired since device activity or being off network,” the document reads.

They're half right. 404 reported Friday evening that multiple experts have discovered a new feature in iOS 18 called “inactivity reboot,” which appears to force iPhones to reboot on the fourth day after being locked—no secret signal-sending required. While the feature could help prevent robbers from using stolen iPhones, it's clearly giving the cops a headache, too.

Bad news, kids. The retail chain Hot Topic confirmed this week that it suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of some 54 million customers. The stolen data includes email addresses for all 54 million people, 25 million “lightly encrypted” credit card numbers, the names, phone numbers, and birthdays of 20 million customers, and even the home addresses of 10 million people. While the hackers behind the breach claimed to have data on far more people than the dataset contains—350 million customers—the exposed data could still be used for identity theft and other malicious activities. Not cool!

Authorities in Germany this week arrested a US citizen for allegedly giving American military secrets to the Chinese government. Identified only as Martin D. due to German privacy laws, prosecutors say he recently “worked for the US armed forces in Germany” and “obtained the information in question during his work with the US armed forces,” according to NBC News. Prosecutors claim that Martin D. “contacted Chinese government agencies and offered to provide them with sensitive US military information for forwarding to a Chinese intelligence service.” Martin D.’s arrest comes just a month after German authorities arrested a woman on suspicion of passing information about arms deliveries to Chinese intelligence.

The FBI is investigating whether Chinese state-backed hackers breached the iPhones of senior staff members in either the Kamala Harris or Donald Trump presidential campaigns, Forbes reports. The CEO of security firm iVerify, Rocky Cole, tells Forbes that his company’s software identified strange changes to the settings on the iPhones of campaign staff “in patterns that are not observed on healthy devices.” (Cole declined to identify which campaign’s staff was impacted.) The FBI told Cole that the affected iPhones belonged to known targets of Chinese hacker group Salt Typhoon, which reportedly breached several US telecom networks including AT&T and Verizon.

Auto-Rebooting iPhones Are Causing Chaos for Cops

The 47-year-old Michigan man, who pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a child, was highly active in the online criminal network called 764, which the FBI now considers a “tier one” terrorism threat.

Richard Densmore, a 47-year old Army veteran and member of the noxious criminal network known as 764, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on Thursday by a federal judge in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Densmore was arrested on federal charges in late January at a home in Kaleva, Michigan, where he lived with his grandmother. He pleaded guilty in July to one count of sexually exploiting a child.

764 and its associated splinter groups have grown at a breakneck speed over the past four years. Since the network’s its creation by a Texas teenager, Bradley Cadenhead, in 2020, criminal cases connected it have cropped up in at least seven US states, as well as Brazil, Canada, the UK, and multiple European nations. Cadenhead is currently serving decades in Texas state prison for offenses related to child sexual abuse imagery.

Because of 764’s ties to extremist ideologies like neofascist accelerationism and the Order of Nine Angles, the US Department of Justice and the FBI categorizes 764 as a “tier one/category 1” terrorism threat that “directly threaten\[s\] the national or economic security of the United States.” According to a federal law enforcement official not authorized to speak on the record, the DOJ has seen 764-related cases in every field office in the US and currently assigns about 10 such cases for investigation every week.

In a press conference after Thursday’s sentencing, assistant attorney general Matt Olsen of the National Security Division for the first time directly addressed 764 as an extremist threat. “This group seeks to do unspeakable harm to children to advance their goals of destroying civilized society, fomenting civil unrest, and ultimately collapsing the US Government institutions,” Olsen said.

Known for its members engaging in child abuse and distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), 764 controls its victims through “extreme fear,” federal officials said, using compromising photographs, personal information, and the threat of public exposure to extort minors into sexual exploitation or self-harm.

“Many members \[of this network\] have an end goal of forcing their victims to commit suicide on livestream for the network’s entertainment or for the perpetrator’s own sense of fame within the 764 network,” Olsen said. “It is difficult to even comprehend such shocking and inhumane violence targeted at innocent and vulnerable children.”

In the government’s sentencing memorandum, federal prosecutors asked that Densmore receive the maximum 30-year penalty for his role in creating and leading “online chat rooms where children were encouraged to cut themselves, bleed for members, and publicly engage in depraved sexual acts.”

Images of Richard Densmore presented by US prosecutors as exhibits in their sentencing recommendations.

Courtesy of the US Department of Justice

Prior government filings show that Densmore ran a 764-adjacent server called “S3wer,” where he hosted other 764 members and provided a space to groom underage victims into sexually exploiting themselves and harming themselves for his benefit, often carving his alias into their bodies in a practice common to 764 and its offshoots known as “cut-signing.” According to prosecutors, some victims are driven to commit suicide on camera for the entertainment and status of their exploiters, though no precise number of suicides connected to 764 as been given.

Using excerpts of online conversations Densmore had both with his victims and other members of 764, mostly on Discord, federal prosecutors showed Densmore’s pride at his place of influence in 764.

In September 2022, Densmore intimidated a victim into self-abuse by demonstrating he had compromising information on them and that he ran not one but two CSAM and extortion servers. “I’m the owner of cultist \[another 764 Discord server\] and 764. I want you to cut for me.” The user responded that they did not cut, to which Densmore responded by threatening to expose confidential information about the minor: “Don’t make daddy angry. I’ll extort you. . . . I have all your information. I own you . . . You do what I say now kitten.”

In an October 2022 Discord conversations between Densmore and another participant in his child abuse servers included by the feds in the evidence against Densmore, he bragged about his exploitation methods.

“I gaslight and make them fucked up. Then they follow me,” Densmore said. “We got a girl to cut her ass off on cam. They kill their pets too. Most will do anything for power.” When a Discord user told Densmore that there was no reason to abuse people, Densmore wrote, “They beg for it.”

Much of the evidence against Densmore was sealed by court order to protect the identities of his victims and because of the shocking nature of the evidence presented against him.

“Densmore’s phones, seized during search warrants in this case, contain some of the most heinous images and videos the undersigned counsel has had the misfortune of seeing,” assistant US attorney Adam Townshend wrote in his sentencing memorandum.

The feds also drilled down on Densmore’s seeming delight in his online notoriety. “Being Discord famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he messaged another user, and in another instance lamented, “Why can’t these ppl just let me be famous.”

Prior to his indictment and arrest, Densmore was initially raided by the FBI in February 2023, when the FBI found CSAM on his devices. When they raided him earlier this year, the feds claim Densmore had two cell phones hidden in an air vent in his bedroom. He’d also faced charges of a sexual offense involving a minor in the 1990s, according to a government filing from January. At one point last year, Densmore posted a video to a 764 server depicting himself burning electronics in a metal barrel outside. “Bye-bye, evidence,” Densmore says on the recording.

Source

Wired