Brokers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefed Capitol Hill workers lately on hardening the safety of their cellular gadgets, after a contacts checklist stolen from the non-public cellphone of the White Home Chief of Employees Susie Wiles was reportedly used to gas a sequence of textual content messages and cellphone 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 are already constructed into most client cellular gadgets.
A screenshot of the primary web page from Sen. Wyden’s letter to FBI Director Kash Patel.
On Might 29, The Wall Avenue Journal reported that federal authorities had been investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate Ms. Wiles through textual content messages and in cellphone calls which will have used AI to spoof her voice. In accordance with The Journal, Wiles informed associates her cellphone contacts had been hacked, giving the impersonator entry to the personal cellphone numbers of among the nation’s most influential individuals.
The execution of this phishing and impersonation marketing campaign — no matter its targets might have been — recommended the attackers had been financially motivated, and never notably refined.
“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 individuals stated,” the Journal wrote. “In lots of circumstances, the impersonator’s grammar was damaged and the messages had been extra formal than the way in which Wiles sometimes communicates, individuals who have obtained the messages stated. The calls and textual content messages additionally didn’t come from Wiles’s cellphone quantity.”
Refined 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 supplied in mid-June to temporary U.S. Senate workers on cellular threats, greater than 140 staffers took them up on that invitation (a remarkably excessive quantity contemplating that no meals was supplied on the occasion).
However in accordance with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the recommendation the FBI supplied to Senate staffers was largely restricted to remedial ideas, corresponding to not clicking on suspicious hyperlinks or attachments, not utilizing public wifi networks, turning off bluetooth, holding cellphone software program updated, and rebooting commonly.
“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 do not need to depend on phishing messages and malicious attachments to contaminate unsuspecting victims with spy ware. Cyber mercenary corporations promote their authorities prospects superior ‘zero-click’ capabilities to ship spy ware that don’t require any motion by the sufferer.”
Wyden confused that to assist counter refined assaults, the FBI ought to be encouraging lawmakers and their workers to allow anti-spyware defenses which are constructed into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android cellphone software program.
These embrace Apple’s Lockdown Mode, which is designed for customers who’re frightened they could be topic to focused assaults. Lockdown Mode restricts non-essential iOS options to cut back the system’s general assault floor. Google Android gadgets carry the same characteristic referred to as Superior Safety Mode.
Wyden additionally urged the FBI to replace its coaching to advocate quite a lot of different steps that folks can take to make their cellular gadgets much less trackable, together with the usage of advert blockers to protect in opposition to malicious ads, disabling advert monitoring IDs in cellular gadgets, and opting out of business knowledge brokers (the suspect charged within the Minnesota shootings reportedly used a number of people-search providers to seek out the house addresses of his targets).
The senator’s letter notes that whereas the FBI has really useful the entire 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.
“Regardless of the seriousness of the risk, the FBI has but to supply efficient defensive steering,” Wyden stated.
Nicholas Weaver is a researcher with the Worldwide Laptop Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Weaver stated Lockdown Mode or Superior Safety will mitigate many vulnerabilities, and ought to 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 ought to be locked down and nicely administered, and so on. And the identical applies to staffers.”
Weaver famous that Apple’s Lockdown Mode has a monitor file of blocking zero-day assaults on iOS purposes; in September 2023, Citizen Lab documented how Lockdown Mode foiled a zero-click flaw able to putting in spy ware on iOS gadgets with none interplay from the sufferer.
Earlier this month, Citizen Lab researchers documented a zero-click assault used to contaminate the iOS gadgets of two journalists with Paragon’s Graphite spy ware. The vulnerability could possibly be exploited merely by sending the goal a booby-trapped media file delivered through iMessage. Apple additionally lately 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 could possibly be exploited on gadgets with Lockdown Mode turned on. However HelpNetSecurity noticed that on the identical 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 refined bodily assault in opposition to particular focused people that allowed attackers to disable USB Restricted Mode on a locked system.
In different phrases, the flaw may apparently be exploited provided that the attacker had bodily entry to the focused susceptible system. And because the previous infosec business adage goes, if an adversary has bodily entry to your system, it’s probably not your system anymore.
I can’t communicate to Google’s Superior Safety Mode personally, as a result of I don’t use Google or Android gadgets. However I’ve had Apple’s Lockdown Mode enabled on all of my Apple gadgets because it was first made accessible in September 2022. I can solely consider a single event when one in every of my apps didn’t work correctly with Lockdown Mode turned on, and in that case I used to be in a position so as to add a brief 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, regardless that nothing then prevents you from contacting that individual straight. This has occurred to me at the very least twice, and in each circumstances the individual in query was already an accepted contact, and stated that they had not tried to achieve out.
Though it might 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.