All of that would represent a serious threat to national security. Except that, strangely, Apple flatly denies it happened. “We strongly disagree with the claims of a targeted attack against our users,” Apple’s head of security engineering, Ivan Krstić, wrote in a statement to WIRED. Apple has patched the issue that iVerify highlighted in its report, which caused iPhones to crash in certain cases when a message sender changed their own nickname and avatar. But it calls those crashes the result of a “conventional software bug,” not evidence of a targeted exploitation. (That blanket denial certainly isn’t Apple’s usual response to confirmed iPhone hacking. The company has, for instance, sued hacking firm NSO group for its targeting of Apple customers.)
The result is that what might have been a four-alarm fire in the counterintelligence world is reduced—for now—to a very troubling enigma.
A 22-year-old former intern at the Heritage Foundation with no national security experience has reportedly been appointed to a key Department of Homeland Security role overseeing a major program designed to combat domestic terrorism.
According to Propublica, Thomas Fugate last month assumed leadership of the Center for Programs and Partnerships (CP3), a DHS office tasked with funding nationwide efforts to prevent politically motivated violence—including school shootings and other forms of domestic terrorism.
Fugate, a 2024 graduate of the University of Texas at San Antonio, replaced the former CP3 director, Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with 20 years of national security experience who resigned in March following staff cuts ordered by the Trump administration.
According to CP3’s most recent report to Congress, the office has funded more than 1,100 initiatives aimed at disrupting violent extremism. In recent months, the US has seen a string of high-profile targeted attacks, including a car bombing in California and the shooting of two Israeli Embassy aids in Washington, DC. Its $18 million grant program, designed to support local prevention efforts, is reportedly now under Fugate’s supervision.
Hacker group names have long been an unavoidable absurdity in the cybersecurity industry. Every threat intelligence company, in a scientifically defensible attempt to not make any assumption that they’re tracking the same hackers as another firm, comes up with their own code name for any group they observe. The result is a somewhat silly profusion of overlapping naming systems based on elements, weather, and zoology: “Fancy Bear” is “Forest Blizzard” is “APT28” is “Strontium.” Now, several major threat intelligence players, including Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto Networks, have finally shared enough of their internal research to agree to a glossary that confirms that they’re referring to the same entities. The companies did not, however, agree to consolidate their naming systems into a single taxonomy. So this agreement doesn’t mean the end of sentences in security reporting such as “the hacker group Sandworm, also known as Telebots, Voodoo Bear, Hades, Iron Viking, Electrum, or Seashell Blizzard.” It just means we cybersecurity reporters can write that sentence with a little more confidence.
Chris Wade, the founder and CTO of mobile device reverse-engineering company Corellium, has had a wild last few decades: In 2005, he was convicted on criminal charges of enabling spammers by providing them proxy servers, and agreed to work undercover for law enforcement while avoiding prison. Then in 2020, he mysteriously received a pardon from President Donald Trump. He also settled a major copyright lawsuit from Apple. Now his company, which creates virtual images of Android and iOS devices so that customers can find ways to break into them, is being acquired by phone-hacking firm Cellebrite, a major law enforcement contractor, for $200 million—a significant payday for a hacker who has found himself on both sides of the law.