Brokers with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefed Capitol Hill employees just lately on hardening the safety of their cell units, after a contacts checklist stolen from the non-public telephone of the White Home Chief of Employees Susie Wiles was reportedly used to gas a sequence of textual content messages and telephone calls impersonating her to U.S. lawmakers. However in a letter this week to the FBI, one of many Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers says the feds aren’t doing sufficient to advocate extra applicable safety protections which can be already constructed into most shopper cell units.
A screenshot of the primary web page from Sen. Wyden’s letter to FBI Director Kash Patel.
On Might 29, The Wall Road Journal reported that federal authorities have been investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate Ms. Wiles by way of textual content messages and in telephone calls which will have used AI to spoof her voice. Based on The Journal, Wiles informed associates her cellphone contacts have been hacked, giving the impersonator entry to the non-public telephone numbers of among the nation’s most influential individuals.
The execution of this phishing and impersonation marketing campaign — no matter its targets could have been — recommended the attackers have been financially motivated, and never notably refined.
“It turned clear to among 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, among the individuals mentioned,” the Journal wrote. “In lots of instances, 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 telephone quantity.”
Subtle or not, the impersonation marketing campaign was quickly punctuated by the homicide of Minnesota Home of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the taking pictures 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 keeping with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the recommendation the FBI supplied to Senate staffers was largely restricted to remedial suggestions, corresponding to not clicking on suspicious hyperlinks or attachments, not utilizing public wifi networks, turning off bluetooth, conserving telephone software program updated, and rebooting frequently.
“That is inadequate to guard Senate workers and different high-value targets in opposition to international spies utilizing superior cyber instruments,” Wyden wrote in a letter despatched at present to FBI Director Kash Patel. “Effectively-funded international intelligence businesses wouldn’t have to depend on phishing messages and malicious attachments to contaminate unsuspecting victims with spy ware. Cyber mercenary corporations promote their authorities clients superior ‘zero-click’ capabilities to ship spy ware that don’t require any motion by the sufferer.”
Wyden careworn that to assist counter refined assaults, the FBI ought to be encouraging lawmakers and their employees to allow anti-spyware defenses which can be constructed into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android telephone software program.
These embrace Apple’s Lockdown Mode, which is designed for customers who’re fearful they could be topic to focused assaults. Lockdown Mode restricts non-essential iOS options to cut back the machine’s general assault floor. Google Android units carry an analogous characteristic known as Superior Safety Mode.
Wyden additionally urged the FBI to replace its coaching to advocate numerous different steps that individuals can take to make their cell units much less trackable, together with using advert blockers to protect in opposition to malicious ads, disabling advert monitoring IDs in cell units, and opting out of economic knowledge brokers (the suspect charged within the Minnesota shootings reportedly used a number of people-search companies to seek out the house addresses of his targets).
The senator’s letter notes that whereas the FBI has really useful all the 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.
“Despite the seriousness of the menace, the FBI has but to supply efficient defensive steerage,” Wyden mentioned.
Nicholas Weaver is a researcher with the Worldwide Pc Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Weaver mentioned Lockdown Mode or Superior Safety will mitigate many vulnerabilities, and ought to 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 ought to be locked down and properly administered, and so on. And the identical applies to staffers.”
Weaver famous that Apple’s Lockdown Mode has a monitor document 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 spy ware on iOS units with none interplay from the sufferer.
Earlier this month, Citizen Lab researchers documented a zero-click assault used to contaminate the iOS units of two journalists with Paragon’s Graphite spy ware. The vulnerability may very well be exploited merely by sending the goal a booby-trapped media file delivered by way of iMessage. Apple additionally just 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 units with Lockdown Mode turned on. However HelpNetSecurity noticed that on the similar time Apple addressed CVE-2025-43200 again in February, the corporate fastened one other vulnerability flagged by Citizen Lab researcher Invoice Marczak: CVE-2025-24200, which Apple mentioned 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 machine.
In different phrases, the flaw might apparently be exploited provided that the attacker had bodily entry to the focused weak machine. And because the outdated infosec business adage goes, if an adversary has bodily entry to your machine, it’s probably 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 units. However I’ve had Apple’s Lockdown Mode enabled on all of my Apple units because it was first made obtainable in September 2022. I can solely consider a single event when one in every of my apps 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 essential 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, despite the fact that nothing then prevents you from contacting that individual immediately. This has occurred to me at the least twice, and in each instances the individual in query was already an authorised contact, and mentioned that they had not tried to succeed in out.
Though it will 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.
