Infosec Decoded Season 6 #98: Phone Hacking

Politics

Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story

Judge orders Voice of America staff reinstated, reversing Trump’s shutdown

India's cheap weight-loss drugs could reshape global obesity fight

On Friday the patent on semaglutide expires in the country. This will allow domestic pharmaceutical companies to release cheaper copies or generics, triggering a rush of competition that could slash prices by more than half and rapidly expand access for people in India, and eventually in other countries too.

Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.

FedRAMP seems corrupt and useless.

Government Registers Aliens.Gov Domain

FDA links raw cheese to outbreak; Makers “100% disagree,” refuse recall

Raw Farm has been associated with over a dozen other outbreaks and many recalls in the last 20 years.

Infosec

Hardware Hacking

Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild

A powerful iPhone-hacking technique known as DarkSword has been discovered in use by Russian hackers. It can take over devices running iOS 18 that simply visit infected websites. It works against iOS devices running iOS 18, which as of last month still accounted for close to a quarter of iPhones.

The hackers who carried out that espionage campaign left the full, unobscured DarkSword code—complete with explanatory comments in English that describe each component and include the “DarkSword" name for the tool—available on those sites for anyone to access and reuse. That carelessness, he says, practically invites other hacker groups to adopt it and target other iPhone users.

A major security flaw could affect 1 in 4 Android phones - here's how to check yours

A hardware security flaw found in many Android phones allowed white hat hackers to gain entry in under a minute, according to a new report. From there, they accessed sensitive user data, including messages and crypto wallet seed phrases.

The vulnerability is rooted in the hardware--in Trustonic's trusted execution environment (TEE), part of a device's processor designed to protect against hacking, and in MediaTek chips. There's a flaw in the boot chain. Patches should be coming out soon.

Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss' — the 2013 console finally fell to voltage glitching, allowing the loading of unsigned code at every level

The hack used two precise voltage glitches: one skipped the loop where the ARM Cortex memory protection was setup. Then the Memcpy operation was targeted during the header read, allowing him to jump to the attacker-controlled data.

Vulnerabilities

Researchers disclose vulnerabilities in IP KVMs from four manufacturers

IP KVMs allow servers to be accessed at the BIOS/UEFI level, so a user can remotely troubleshoot the server, even reinstall the operating system.

“These are not exotic zero-days requiring months of reverse engineering,” Eclypsium researchers Paul Asadoorian and Reynaldo Vasquez Garcia wrote. “These are fundamental security controls that any networked device should implement. Input validation. Authentication. Cryptographic verification. Rate limiting. We are looking at the same class of failures that plagued early IoT devices a decade ago, but now on a device class that provides the equivalent of physical access to everything it connects to.”

Human Errors

FancyBear Exposed: Major OPSEC Blunder Inside Russian Espionage Ops

The Russian military left two directories open on a C2 server, exposing C2 source code and stolen data.

China's biggest cybersecurity firm accidentally leaked an SSL key in a public installer

Qihoo 360 shipped a highly sensitive wildcard SSL private certificate inside the public installer for its 360 Security Claw AI assistant. The company has not officially responded to the incident or revoked the compromised key at the time of writing.

Sears Exposed AI Chatbot Phone Calls and Text Chats to Anyone on the Web

The exposed Sears databases uncovered by Fowler, which have since been secured, contained 3.7 million chat logs, plus 1.4 million audio files and plain text transcripts from 2024 to this year.

Any exposed customer data is problematic, but Fowler was particularly concerned about the Sears data for two reasons. First, such information would be extremely useful in phishing attacks, because it includes details about customers’ contact information and home lives, including their appliances, which could be exploited for warranty scams and other targeting.

The second shock came from the fact that a surprising number of the audio calls captured hours of ambient audio after customers apparently thought a call had ended. Some of the recordings were up to four hours long.

Other Infosec

Here’s why I’ve installed a Dead Man's Switch on my home server

GlassWorm malware hits 400+ code repos on GitHub, npm, VSCode, OpenVSX

It's a Russian supply-chain attack, using invisible Unicode characters and the Solana blockchain.

2025 Identity Threat Landscape Report

Inside the Infostealer Economy: Credential Threats in 2025

MFA alone is no longer sufficient protection. 276 million of the credentials indexed in 2025 included active session cookies, meaning attackers can bypass multi-factor authentication entirely. This represents 31% of all malware-sourced credentials.

Switzerland built a secure alternative to BGP. The rest of the world hasn't noticed yet

SCION, which stands for Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next-Generation Networks, is an internet routing architecture developed at ETH Zürich. SCION uses multi-path routing, isolation domains so error or compromise in one isolation domain cannot propagate to another, and cryptographic path validation.

This is "A genuine attempt to give senders and receivers control over the path their data takes, rather than leaving it to intermediate routers whose behavior cannot be verified."