Brokers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefed Capitol Hill employees lately on hardening the safety of their cell gadgets, after a contacts record stolen from the non-public cellphone of the White Home Chief of Workers Susie Wiles was reportedly used to gas a collection 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 applicable safety protections which are already constructed into most shopper cell gadgets.
A screenshot of the primary web page from Sen. Wyden’s letter to FBI Director Kash Patel.
On Could 29, The Wall Avenue Journal reported that federal authorities have been investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate Ms. Wiles through textual content messages and in cellphone calls that will have used AI to spoof her voice. In keeping with The Journal, Wiles instructed associates her cellphone contacts have been hacked, giving the impersonator entry to the non-public cellphone numbers of a number of the nation’s most influential folks.
The execution of this phishing and impersonation marketing campaign — no matter its targets could have been — urged the attackers have been financially motivated, and never significantly refined.
“It grew to become clear to a number of the lawmakers that the requests have 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, a number of the folks mentioned,” the Journal wrote. “In lots of circumstances, the impersonator’s grammar was damaged and the messages have been extra formal than the best way Wiles sometimes communicates, individuals who have acquired the messages mentioned. 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 provided in mid-June to temporary U.S. Senate employees 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 line with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the recommendation the FBI offered to Senate staffers was largely restricted to remedial ideas, equivalent to not clicking on suspicious hyperlinks or attachments, not utilizing public wifi networks, turning off bluetooth, preserving cellphone software program updated, and rebooting usually.
“That is inadequate to guard Senate staff and different high-value targets in opposition to international spies utilizing superior cyber instruments,” Wyden wrote in a letter despatched at the moment to FBI Director Kash Patel. “Effectively-funded international intelligence companies shouldn’t have to depend on phishing messages and malicious attachments to contaminate unsuspecting victims with spyware and adware. Cyber mercenary corporations promote their authorities prospects superior ‘zero-click’ capabilities to ship spyware and adware that don’t require any motion by the sufferer.”
Wyden careworn that to assist counter refined assaults, the FBI must be encouraging lawmakers and their employees to allow anti-spyware defenses which are constructed into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android cellphone software program.
These embody Apple’s Lockdown Mode, which is designed for customers who’re nervous they might be topic to focused assaults. Lockdown Mode restricts non-essential iOS options to scale back the machine’s general assault floor. Google Android gadgets carry an identical 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 cell gadgets much less trackable, together with the usage of advert blockers to protect in opposition to malicious commercials, disabling advert monitoring IDs in cell gadgets, and opting out of business knowledge brokers (the suspect charged within the Minnesota shootings reportedly used a number of people-search companies to seek out the house addresses of his targets).
The senator’s letter notes that whereas the FBI has beneficial the entire above precautions in numerous 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 offer efficient defensive steering,” Wyden mentioned.
Nicholas Weaver is a researcher with the Worldwide Laptop Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Weaver mentioned Lockdown Mode or Superior Safety will mitigate many vulnerabilities, and must be the default setting for all members of Congress and their employees.
“Lawmakers are at distinctive threat and must be exceptionally protected,” Weaver mentioned. “Their computer systems must be locked down and nicely administered, and so on. 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 spyware and adware 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 spyware and adware. The vulnerability may very well 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 may very well 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 mentioned was utilized in an especially refined bodily assault in opposition to particular focused people that allowed attackers to disable USB Restricted Mode on a locked machine.
In different phrases, the flaw may apparently be exploited provided that the attacker had bodily entry to the focused weak machine. And because the previous infosec business adage goes, if an adversary has bodily entry to your machine, it’s almost certainly not your machine 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 ready so as to add a short lived exception for that app in Lockdown Mode’s settings.
My predominant 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, although nothing then prevents you from contacting that individual immediately. This has occurred to me a minimum of twice, and in each circumstances the individual in query was already an authorised contact, and mentioned that they had not tried to succeed in 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.
