You may have already heard, but Donald Trump will be president of the United States again. The extreme right celebrates by calling for mass executions. The left is responding with its own electoral conspiracy theories. The rioters convicted on January 6 are betting on clemency. And the women who oppose Trump, frankly, have had enough.
Before Election Day, WIRED discovered that an “election integrity” app created by True the Vote, a right-wing group that helped popularize election denialism around the 2020 election, was leaking its users’ emails. . In one case, he revealed to an election official in California that he appeared to be involved in illegal voter suppression.
Disinformation and other forms of election interference have been a major problem since the Russian attack on the Democratic National Committee in the run-up to the 2016 election. But 2024 appears to have been the worst yet, with U.S. officials warning that Russia had expanded their efforts to unprecedented levels.
In non-election news, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander “Connor” Moucka, accused of hacking a large number of Snowflake cloud storage customers earlier this year. Security experts who have long followed the exploits of a hacker calling himself Waifu, who authorities say is Moucka, believe he is “one of the most important threat actors of 2024.”
A federal judge in Michigan sentenced Richard Densmore to 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a child. Densmore was very active in 764, an online criminal network that the FBI now considers a “level one” terrorist threat.
Finally, in the first WIRED story published in partnership with 404 MediaReporter (and 404 co-owner) Joseph Cox took a deep dive into the world of data-stealing malware, the same type used in all those Snowflake account breaches that Moucka is accused of.
And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Some iPhones held by police for forensic examinations suddenly reboot, making it difficult for investigators to access their contents. 404 Media reports. Police use tools like Cellebrite to essentially hack phones, but this is usually done when a device is in the state called After First Unlock (AFU). Once reset, iPhones are placed in Before First Unlock (BFU), making them much more difficult to access with forensic tools.
According to a document obtained by 404, police believed the sudden reboots were due to the fact that the devices were running iOS 18, Apple’s new mobile operating system. Police suspected that iOS 18 contains a secret feature that allowed affected devices, all in airplane mode, to communicate with other nearby iPhones, sending “a signal to the devices to restart after so much time since activity had elapsed.” of the device or being outside the network,” the document reads.
