Plus: North Korean hackers get into generative AI, a phone surveillance tool that can monitor billions of devices gets exposed, and ambient light sensors pose a new privacy risk.

Police took a digital rendering of a suspect's face, generated using DNA evidence, and ran it through a facial recognition system in a troubling incident reported for the first time by WIRED this week. The tactic came to light in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. Meanwhile, information about United States intelligence agencies purchasing Americans' phone location data and internet metadata without a warrant was revealed this week only after US senator Ron Wyden blocked the appointment of a new NSA director until the information was made public. And a California teen who allegedly used the handle Torswats to carry out hundreds of swatting attacks across the US is being extradited to Florida to face felony charges.

The infamous spyware developer NSO Group, creator of the Pegasus spyware, has been quietly planning a comeback, which involves investing millions of dollars lobbying in Washington while exploiting the Israel-Hamas war to stoke global security fears and position its products as a necessity. Breaches of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, disclosed in recent days, have pushed the espionage operations of the well-known Russia-backed hacking group Midnight Blizzard back into the spotlight. And Amazon-owned Ring said this week that it is shutting down a feature of its controversial Neighbors app that gave law enforcement a free pass to request footage from users without a warrant.

WIRED had a deep dive this week into the Israel-linked hacking group known as Predatory Sparrow and its notably aggressive offensive cyberattacks, particularly against Iranian targets, which have included crippling thousands of gas stations and setting a steel mill on fire. With so much going on, we've got the perfect quick weekend project for iOS users who want to feel more digitally secure: Make sure you've upgraded your iPhone to iOS 17.3 and then turn on Apple's new Stolen Device Protection feature, which could block thieves from taking over your accounts.

And there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

After first disclosing a breach in October, the ancestry and genetics company 23andMe said in December that personal data from 6.9 million users was impacted in the incident stemming from attackers compromising roughly 14,000 user accounts. These accounts then gave attackers access to information voluntarily shared by users in a social feature the company calls DNA Relatives. 23andMe has blamed users for the account intrusions, saying that they only occurred because victims set weak or reused passwords on their accounts. But a state-mandated filing in California about the incident reveals that the attackers started compromising customers’ accounts in April and continued through much of September without the company ever detecting suspicious activity—and that someone was trying to guess and brute-force users' passwords.

North Korea has been using generative artificial intelligence tools “to search for hacking targets and search for technologies needed for hacking,” according to a senior official at South Korea's National Intelligence Service who spoke to reporters on Wednesday under the condition of anonymity. The official said that Pyongyang has not yet begun incorporating generative AI into active offensive hacking operations but that South Korean officials are monitoring the situation closely. More broadly, researchers say they are alarmed by North Korea's development and use of AI tools for multiple applications.

The digital ad industry is notorious for enabling the monitoring and tracking of users across the web. New findings from 404 Media highlight a particularly insidious service, Patternz, that draws data from ads in hundreds of thousands of popular, mainstream apps to reportedly fuel a global surveillance dragnet. The tool and its visibility have been marketed to governments around the world to integrate with other intelligence agency surveillance capabilities. “The pipeline involves smaller, obscure advertising firms and advertising industry giants like Google. In response to queries from 404 Media, Google and PubMatic, another ad firm, have already cut-off a company linked to the surveillance firm,” 404's Joseph Cox wrote.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have devised an algorithm that could be used to convert data from smart devices' ambient light sensors into an image of the scene in front of the device. A tool like this could be used to turn a smart home gadget or mobile device into a surveillance tool. Ambient light sensors measure light in an environment and automatically adjust a screen's brightness to make it more usable in different conditions. But because ambient light data isn't considered to be sensitive, these sensors automatically have certain permissions in an operating system and generally don't require specific approval from a user to be used by an app. As a result, the researchers point out that bad actors could potentially abuse the readings from these sensors without users having recourse to block the information stream.

23andMe Failed to Detect Account Intrusions for Months

A California teenager who allegedly used the handle Torswats to carry out a nationwide swatting campaign is being extradited to Florida to face felony charges, WIRED has learned.

For more than a year, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has been hunting the person whom experts say is one of the most prolific swatters in American history. Law enforcement now believes they have finally arrested the person responsible.

A 17-year-old from California is allegedly the swatter known as Torswats, according to sources familiar with the investigation. The teenager is currently in custody and awaiting extradition from California to Seminole County, Florida. The Florida State Attorney’s Office tells WIRED that he faces four felony counts.

Seminole County, located in central Florida, had two high-profile swatting incidents within the last 12 months, including one targeting a mosque and another targeting a courthouse. Todd Brown, a spokesperson for Florida’s Office of the State Attorney in the 18th Circuit, confirmed the charges against the teen and his extradition. Brown says he will be prosecuted as an adult under Florida law. WIRED is withholding the 17-year-old’s name because he is a minor.

The teenager’s arrest comes in the midst of a nationwide swatting surge. Swatting attacks typically involve someone calling in fake attacks to 911 in an attempt to solicit an overwhelming police response. Since Christmas, swatters have targeted the homes of prominent politicians from both parties, judges handling cases involving former US president Donald Trump, and the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Prior to these high-profile swats, a relentless campaign from different, potentially foreign, swatting groups targeted hundreds of schools and universities around the US over the past year and a half. Last May, an officer in Danvers, Massachusetts, accidentally fired his service weapon while responding to a school swat. In February, an officer in Saginaw Township, Michigan, rammed his vehicle through the school’s locked door to get inside the building following a swatting call.

According to the Florida State Attorney’s Office, the charges against the California teenager include making false reports concerning the planting of a bomb or the use of firearms, causing a law enforcement response. All charges are described as related to acts of terrorism and showing prejudice based on race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, or religion.

In private Telegram chats witnessed by WIRED over the past year, a person operating the Torswats handle claimed responsibility for hundreds of false reports of bomb threats and active shootings called into schools, politicians’ homes, courthouses, and religious institutions around the US.

Brad “Cafrozed” Dennis, a private investigator who works for high-profile Twitch streamers who've been swatted, has been hunting Torswats for nearly two years and actively helping the FBI’s investigation. “It’s a beautiful day,” Dennis says. “I am very relieved Tor will no longer be able to conduct his reign of terror on our schools and public officials just doing their jobs.”

According to records shared with WIRED, Dennis engaged someone using the Torswats handle on a peer-to-peer chatting service called Tox under the guise of ordering a swat in December 2022. By recording his network traffic, the investigator surreptitiously captured the swatter’s IP address along with a username that at the time was unknown to law enforcement. According to Dennis, in January 2023, he handed the evidence to the FBI special agents in charge of Torswats’ case. In emails shared with WIRED, the FBI told Dennis this information was used in subpoenas sent to YouTube and Discord. Court records related to the case against the California teen have not yet been made public.

Police Arrest Teen Said to Be Linked to Hundreds of Swatting Attacks

US spy agencies purchased Americans’ phone location data and internet metadata without a warrant but only admitted it after a US senator blocked the appointment of a new NSA director.

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts.

Ron Wyden, the US senator from Oregon, informed the nation’s intelligence chief, Avril Haines, on Thursday that the Pentagon only agreed to release details about the data purchases, which had always been unclassified, after Wyden hindered the Senate's efforts to appoint a new director of the National Security Agency. “The secrecy around data purchases was amplified,” Wyden wrote, “because intelligence agencies have sought to keep the American people in the dark."

Wyden's office says it’s been investigating sales of location data to the government for years, uncovering multiple ties between the Department of Defense and what the senator refers to as “shady companies" committing “flagrant violations” of people's privacy. The companies' practices are “not just unethical, but illegal,” he says.

Pentagon offices known to have purchased location data from these companies include the Defense Intelligence Agency and the NSA, among others. Wyden's letter, first reported by _The New York Times_, indicates that the NSA is also “buying Americans' domestic internet metadata.”

Wyden's disclosure comes amid a fight in the US House of Representatives over efforts to outlaw the purchases entirely. Last month, members of the House Judiciary Committee attached legislation doing so, known as the _Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act_, to a bill reauthorizing a contentious surveillance program known as Section 702.

The bill, originally coauthored by Wyden, nearly received a vote last month during a showdown with rival legislation introduced by the House Intelligence Committee that does not seek to ban the purchases. Congressional sources tell WIRED the vote was called off at the last minute after Biden administration officials and members of the intelligence committee staged a campaign against the privacy-enhancing measures.

Intelligence officials in the House held separate meetings with members and their aides aiming to discourage support for the judiciary bill—the _Protect Liberty Act_—alleging that new warrant requirements would be overly burdensome for law enforcement, despite a slew of exemptions for cyberwarfare, terrorism, and espionage threats.

Six sources who attended the meetings told WIRED that intelligence committee members used images of Hamas militants in presentations to drive home its argument for relaxing limits on domestic surveillance. The message, Republican aides said, was, “it could happen here.” Three Democrats who attended meetings with representatives from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, described the presentation as a “scare tactic.”

The home surveillance debate, which has exploded in recent months, hampering the passing of routine legislation, has largely focused on Section 702, an authority under which the government monitors the calls, texts, and emails of foreign nationals. Section 702 is set to expire in under four months.

Both the _Protect Liberty Act_ and its intelligence committee rival—the _FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act_—aim to reauthorize Section 702 into the future. In how that's accomplished the bills are radically different. With access by the FBI to foreign intelligence for domestic investigations being the biggest point of contention, federal lawmakers can now effectively be divided into two factions: people who support surveillance warrants and people who don't.

The pro-warrant _Protect Liberty Ac_t could receive a vote as early as next month, with its provisions banning the government from buying data as a means of evading warrant requirements. Republicans on the Hill say they can't be sure whether House Speaker Mike Johnson will allow a vote, however, due to the intense amount of pressure he faces from the intelligence system.

“There is a lot of baloney going around about surveillance reform," Wyden says. “Probably because some surveillance supporters are worried they won’t win an honest debate.”

The Pentagon Tried to Hide That It Bought Americans’ Data Without a Warrant

Newly disclosed breaches of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise highlight the persistent threat posed by Midnight Blizzard, a notorious Russian cyber-espionage group.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) both recently disclosed that they suffered corporate email breaches at the hands of Russia's “Midnight Blizzard” hackers.

The group, which is tied to the Kremlin's SVR foreign intelligence, is specifically linked to SVR's APT 29 Cozy Bear, the gang that meddled in the United States 2016 presidential election, has conducted aggressive government and corporate espionage around the world for years, and was behind the infamous 2021 SolarWinds supply chain attack. While both HP's and Microsoft's breaches came to light within days of each other, the situation mainly illustrates the ongoing reality of Midnight Blizzard's international espionage activities and the lengths it will go to to find weaknesses in organizations' digital defenses.

“We shouldn't be surprised that Russian intelligence-backed threat actors, and SVR in particular, are targeting tech companies like Microsoft and HPE. With organizations that size, it would be a much bigger surprise to learn they weren't,” says Jake Williams, a former US National Security Agency hacker and current faculty member at the Institute for Applied Network Security.

HP Enterprise said in a US Securities and Exchange Commission submission posted on Wednesday that Midnight Blizzard gained access to its “cloud-based email environment” last year. The company first learned about the situation on December 12, 2023, but said that the attack began in May 2023. Hackers “accessed and exfiltrated data … from a small percentage of HPE mailboxes belonging to individuals in our cybersecurity, go-to-market, business segments, and other functions,” the company wrote in the SEC filing. HP Enterprise said the breach likely came about as the result of another incident, discovered in June 2023, in which Midnight Blizzard also accessed and exfiltrated company “SharePoint” files beginning as early as May 2023. SharePoint is a much-targeted cloud collaboration platform made by Microsoft that integrates with Microsoft 365.

“The accessed data is limited to information contained in the HPE users’ email boxes,” HP Enterprise spokesperson Adam Bauer told WIRED in a statement. “We continue to investigate and analyze these mailboxes to identify information that could have been accessed and will make appropriate notifications as required.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft said on Friday that it detected a system intrusion on January 12 tied to a November 2023 breach. The attackers targeted and compromised some historic Microsoft system test accounts that then allowed them to access “a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions.” From there the group was able to exfiltrate “some emails and attached documents.” Microsoft noted in its disclosure that the attackers appeared to be seeking information about Microsoft's investigations and knowledge of Midnight Blizzard itself.

“The attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft products or services. To date, there is no evidence that the threat actor had any access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems,” the company wrote in its disclosure. “This attack does highlight the continued risk posed to all organizations from well-resourced nation-state threat actors like Midnight Blizzard.”

In an August 2022 report from the threat intelligence firm Mandiant, incident response leader Doug Bienstock wrote that the firm “continues to identify APT29 operations targeting the United States' (US) interests, and those of NATO and partner countries.” He noted that even though the hacking group is widely known, it has continued to be “extremely prolific” and returns to target certain victims multiple times over months or even years. “This persistence and aggressiveness are indicative of sustained interest in this information and strict tasking by the Russian Government,” Bienstock wrote, adding, “Mandiant has observed APT29 continue to demonstrate exceptional operational security and advanced tactics targeting Microsoft 365.”

While Midnight Blizzard is far from a new threat, researchers point out that it's always productive to have renewed attention on the issue of persistent state-backed espionage. Williams, of the Institute for Applied Network Security, also highlights the hackers' counterintelligence goals in the recent Microsoft breach—that Midnight Blizzard appeared to be specifically interested in learning what company executives know about their group and methods.

"I'm not surprised that the threat actors were observed looking for what information Microsoft had on them,” Williams says. “But it's a great piece of evidence to remind us that threat actors are regularly monitoring our own investigative efforts as defenders.”

Big-Name Targets Push Midnight Blizzard Hacking Spree Back Into the Limelight

From repeatedly crippling thousands of gas stations to setting a steel mill on fire, Predatory Sparrow’s offensive hacking has now targeted Iranians with some of history's most aggressive cyberattacks.

About eight minutes after 3 am on June 27, 2022, inside the Khouzestan steel mill near Iran's western coastline on the Persian Gulf, a massive lid lowered onto a vat of glowing, molten metal. Based on footage from a surveillance camera inside the plant, the giant vessel was several times taller than the two workers in gray uniforms and hardhats standing nearby, likely large enough to carry well over a hundred tons of liquid steel heated to several thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

In the video, the two workers walk out of frame. The clip jump-cuts forward 10 minutes. Then suddenly, the giant ladle is moving, swinging steadily toward the camera. A fraction of a second later, burning embers fly in all directions, fire and smoke fill the factory, and incandescent, liquid steel can be seen pouring freely out of the bottom of the vat onto the plant floor.

Written across the bottom of the video is a kind of disclaimer from Predatory Sparrow, the group of hackers who took credit for this cyber-induced mayhem and posted the video clip to their channel on the messaging service Telegram: “As you can see in this video,” it reads, “this cyberattack has been carried out carefully so to protect innocent individuals.”

A close watch of the video, in fact, reveals something like the opposite: Eight seconds after the steel mill catastrophe begins, two workers can be seen running out from underneath the ladle assembly, through the shower of embers, just feet away from the torrent of flaming liquid metal. “If they were closer to the ladle egress point, they would have been cooked,” says Paul Smith, the chief technology officer of industrial-focused cybersecurity firm SCADAfence, who analyzed the attack. “Imagine getting hit by 1,300-degrees-Celsius molten steel. That's instant death.”

A clip from a video posted by Predatory Sparrow hacker group showing the effects of its cyberattack on Khouzestan steel mill in Iran. Although the group claims in the video’s text to have taken care to protect “innocent individuals,” two steelworkers can be seen (circled in red) narrowly escaping the spill of molten metal and the resulting fire that the hackers triggered.

Predatory Sparrow via Telegram

The Khouzestan steel mill sabotage represents one of only a handful of examples in history of a cyberattack with physically destructive effects. But for Predatory Sparrow, it was just a part of a years-long career of digital intrusions that includes several of the most aggressive offensive hacking incidents ever documented. In the years before and after that attack—which targeted three Iranian steelworks, though only one intrusion successfully caused physical destruction—Predatory Sparrow crippled the country's railway system computers and disrupted payment systems across the majority of Iran's gas station pumps not once but twice, including in an attack last month that once again disabled point-of-sale systems at more than 4,000 gas stations, creating a nationwide fuel shortage.

In fact, Predatory Sparrow, which typically refers to itself in public statements by the Farsi translation of its name, Gonjeshke Darande, has been tightly focused on Iran for years, long before Israel's war with Hamas further raised tensions between the two countries. Very often the hackers target the Iranian civilian population with disruptive attacks that follow Iran's own acts of aggression through hacking or military proxies. The latest gas station attack, for instance, came after Iran-linked hackers compromised Israeli-made equipment at water utilities around the world and Iran-backed Houthi rebels launched missiles at Israel and attacked shipping vessels in the Red Sea. “Khamenei!” Predatory Sparrow wrote in Farsi on its Twitter feed, addressing Iran's supreme leader. “We will react against your evil provocations in the region.”

While Predatory Sparrow maintains the veneer of a hacktivist group—often affecting the guise of one that is itself Iranian—its technical sophistication hints at likely involvement from a government or military. US defense sources speaking to _The New York Times_ in 2021 linked the hackers to Israel. Yet some cybersecurity analysts who track the group say that even as it carries out attacks that fit most definitions of cyberwar, one of its hallmarks is restraint—limiting the damage it could cause while demonstrating it could have achieved more. Attempting to achieve an _appearance_ of restraint, at least, might be more accurate: The physical endangerment of at least two Khouzestan staffers in its steel mill attack represents a glaring exception to its claims of safety.

Predatory Sparrow is distinguished most of all by its apparent interest in sending a specific geopolitical message with its attacks, says Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, an analyst at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne who has tracked the group for years. Those messages are all variations on a theme: If you attack Israel or its allies, we have the ability to deeply disrupt your civilization. “They're showing that they can reach out and touch Iran in meaningful ways,” Guerrero-Saade says. “They're saying, ‘You can prop up the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah in these proxy wars. But we, Predatory Sparrow, can dismantle your country piece by piece without having to move from where we are.’”

Here's a brief history of Predatory's short but distinguished track record of hyper-disruptive cyberattacks.

2021: Train Chaos

In early July of 2021, computers showing schedules across Iran's national railway system began to display messages in Farsi declaring the message “long delay because of cyberattack,” or simply “canceled,” along with the phone number of the office of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as if to suggest that Iranians call the number for updates or to complain. SentinelOne's Guerrero-Saade analyzed the malware used in the attack, which he dubbed Meteor Express, and found that the hackers had deployed a three-stage wiping program that destroyed computers' file systems, locked out users, and then wiped the master boot record that machines use to locate their operating system when they start up. Iran's Fars radio station reported that the result of the cyberattack was “unprecedented chaos,” but it later deleted that statement.

Around the same time, computers across the network of Iran's Ministry of Roads and Urban Development were hit with the wiper tool, too. Analysis of the wiper malware by Israeli security firm CheckPoint revealed that the hackers had likely used different versions of the same tools years earlier while breaking into Iran-linked targets in Syria, in those cases under the guise of a hacker group named for the Hindu god of storms, Indra.

“Our goal of this cyber attack while maintaining the safety of our countrymen is to express our disgust with the abuse and cruelty that the government ministries and organizations allow to the nation,” Predatory Sparrow wrote in a post in Farsi on its Telegram channel, suggesting that it was posing as an Iranian hacktivist group as it claimed credit for the attacks.

2021: Gas Station Paralysis

Just a few months later, on October 26, 2021, Predatory Sparrow struck again. This time, it targeted point-of-sale systems at more than 4,000 gas stations across Iran—the majority of all fuel pumps in the country—taking down the system used to accept payment by gasoline subsidy cards distributed to Iranian citizens. Hamid Kashfi, an Iranian emigré and founder of the cybersecurity firm DarkCell, analyzed the attack but only published his detailed findings last month. He notes that the attack's timing came exactly two years after the Iranian government attempted to reduce fuel subsidies, triggering riots across the country. Echoing the railway attack, the hackers displayed a message on fuel pump screens with the Supreme Leader's phone number, as if to blame Iran's government for this gas disruption, too. “If you look at it from a holistic view, it looks like an attempt to trigger riots again in the country,” Kashfi says, “to increase the gap between the government and the people and cause more tension.”

The attack immediately led to long lines at gas stations across Iran that lasted days. But Kashfi argues that the gas station attack, despite its enormous effects, represents one where Predatory Sparrow demonstrated actual restraint. He inferred, based on detailed data uploaded by Iranian incident responders to the malware repository VirusTotal, that the hackers had enough access to the gas stations' payment infrastructure to have destroyed the entire system, forcing manual reinstallation of software at gas stations or even reissuing of subsidy cards. Instead, they merely wiped the point-of-sale systems in a way that would allow relatively quick recovery.

Predatory Sparrow even went so far as to claim on its Telegram account that it had emailed the vendor for the point-of-sale systems, Ingenico, to warn the company about an unpatched vulnerability in its software that could have been used to cause more permanent disruption to the payment system. (Curiously, an Ingenico spokesperson tells WIRED its security team never received any such email.)

Predatory Sparrow also wrote on Telegram that it had sent text messages to Iran's civilian emergency services, posting screenshots of its warnings to those emergency services to fuel up their vehicles prior to the attack. “You don't see that often, right?” Kashfi says. “They chose to do very clean, controlled damage.”

2022: Steel Mill Meltdown

In June of 2022, Predatory Sparrow carried out one of the most brazen acts of cybersabotage in history, triggering the spillage of molten steel at Iran's Khouzestan steel mill that caused a fire in the facility.

To prove that it had carried out the attack and had not merely claimed credit for an unrelated industrial accident, the hackers posted a screenshot to Telegram of the so-called human-machine interface, or HMI software, that the steelworks used to control its equipment. Paul Smith, the SCADAfence CTO who investigated the incident, quickly found a page on the website of the Iranian IT firm Irisa that listed the Khouzestan steel mill as one of its projects, matching the Irisa logo on the HMI screenshot.

Smith says he also found that both the HMI software and the surveillance camera that Predatory Sparrow used to record a video of its attack were connected to the internet and discoverable on Shodan, a search engine that catalogs vulnerable internet-of-things devices. Smith, who has a background working in steel mills, theorizes that the attack's damage was caused when the hackers used their access to the HMI to bypass a “degassing” step in the steel refining process that removes gases trapped in molten steel, which can otherwise cause explosions. He speculates that it was exactly that sort of explosion of gases trapped in the molten steel that caused the ladle to move and pour its contents on the factory floor.

A still from Predatory Sparrow’s video shows the Khouzestan steel mill prior to the hackers’ cyberattack…

Predatory Sparrow via Telegram

..then after the attack begins, as embers, fire and smoke fill the factory…

Predatory Sparrow via Telegram

…caused by a spill of burning liquid steel onto the factory floor, visible here.

Predatory Sparrow via Telegram

Predatory Sparrow touted in its video, which it posted to Telegram, that it had carried out the attack “carefully so to protect innocent individuals,” suggesting that it had monitored the surveillance footage to make sure no humans were in danger. Smith doesn't buy that claim. Even beyond the two Iranian steelworkers forced to run through flying embers, feet away from burning liquid metal, he argues that the viewer can't see who else might have been in harm's way. “You don't know if anyone was hurt,” Smith says.

The Khouzestan steel mill was just one of three steel facilities that Predatory Sparrow breached in its intrusions, though those operations weren't solely targeted at physical sabotage. A week later, the group also began to post tens of thousands of stolen emails from the three steel facilities—all of which faced Western sanctions—designed to demonstrate their ties to the Iranian military.

2023: Gas Station Paralysis, Redux

With tensions rising across the Middle East following Hamas' October 7 attacks in southern Israel and Israel's overwhelming military response in the Gaza Strip, perhaps it was inevitable that Predatory Sparrow would play a role in that burgeoning conflict. As Iran-backed Houthi rebels began to blockade shipping in the Red Sea—and as an Iran-linked hacker group calling itself CyberAveng3rs hacked water utilities across the US with anti-Israel messages—the group staged a December 18 rerun of its 2021 gas station attack, crippling point-of-sale systems at pumps at the majority of the country's filling stations.

While technical details of this latest attack are still scant, DarkCell's Hamid Kashfi says it appears to follow the same playbook as the 2021 hacking incident, albeit likely exploiting different security vulnerabilities in the equipment. Again, Predatory Sparrow posted messages it claimed to have sent to Iranian emergency services ahead of the disruption, in an attempt to limit harm. “As in our previous operations, this cyberattack was conducted in a controlled manner while taking measures to limit potential damage to emergency services,” reads a message from the group on Telegram.

Yet again, Predatory Sparrow also made clear its hacking was intended to carry a message. “This cyberattack comes in response to the aggression of the Islamic Republic and its proxies in the region,” another of the group’s messages reads. “Khamenei, playing with fire has a price.”

SentinelOne’s Guerrero-Saade argues that actions like the gas station cyberattacks suggest that Predatory Sparrow may be the first effective example of what cyber policy wonks refer to as “signaling”—using cyberattack capabilities to send messages designed to deter an adversary's behavior. That's because, he says, the group has combined a relatively restrained and discriminating approach to its politically motivated hacking with a clear demonstration of willingness to use its capabilities for broad effects—a willingness, he points out, that the United States’ hacking agencies, like the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, have often lacked.

“There’s no such thing as effective signaling if you can’t show credibly to the other person that not only do you _have_ the capability, but that you’re willing to use it,” Guerrero-Saade says.

Some cybersecurity researchers point to Predatory Sparrow, too, as a model of more responsible cyberwarfare, with a more careful regard for civilians. In the wake of the Israeli military’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the displacement of millions more in its response to Hamas' October 7 massacre, however, any suggestion of restraint or discrimination from a hacker group that likely has Israeli government ties warrants skepticism.

Guerrero-Saade himself admits that the steel mill attack video, and in particular the two Iranian staffers’ apparent close call with death captured in it, raises questions of the cost of Predatory Sparrow’s “careful” style of attack.

“Is it perfect? Is it without casualties or concerns? Not at all,” Guerrero-Saade says. “I’m not saying I support it. But I am fascinated by it.”

How a Group of Israel-Linked Hackers Has Pushed the Limits of Cyberwar

The Amazon-owned home surveillance company says it is shuttering a feature in its Neighbors app that allows police to request footage from users. But it’s not shutting out the cops entirely.

Reached for comment, Markey’s office directed WIRED to the senator’s statement posted to X, in which he called the shuttering of the RFA tool “good.”

“I’ve been sounding the alarm for years on Amazon Ring’s privacy and security failures,” Markey added. “We cannot allow Americans' home security systems to become surveillance tools for law enforcement. We have to prevent Big Tech's web of surveillance systems from growing.”

Evan Greer, director of civil liberties advocacy group Fight for the Future and a vocal critic of Ring, called the company's decision today an “unequivocal victory” for those who have campaigned against the company’s surveillance network, but added in their statement that the move “only scratches the surface of addressing the harm done by Ring's dystopian business model.”

“We need laws. Local, state, and federal elected officials should ban these types of private surveillance partnerships entirely, and should impose strict limits on where homeowners and businesses can place cameras to ensure they are not violating their neighbors’ privacy and rights,” Greer said.

Ring’s Yarger tells WIRED that the decision to shut down the RFA tool was “purely internal” and cited that the company recently hired a new CEO, Liz Hamren, who took over in March 2023. “As you may know, we have a new Ring CEO and leader,” Yarger says. “As we look to the future of Neighbors, we’re focusing our resources on delivering new product and app experiences that we feel are a better fit with Ring’s vision and can better empower our customers to connect with each other, and stay informed by local government and public safety agencies.”

This shift, according to the company’s announcement today, includes the launch of “Ring Moments,” which encourages users to share content that inspires “joy and hope,” such as a video of a bear in a swimming pool or neighbors helping each other shovel snow.

For Ring users still concerned about police overreach, EFF’s Guariglia notes that there are several actions you can take, including enabling end-to-end encryption on your devices. “Be mindful of what your camera is pointed at and what video and audio it may collect from yourself, your family, and your neighbors,” he tells WIRED. “If possible, try to clear your camera’s recorded video/audio as often as is feasible. And most importantly, if police come and ask for your footage, request that they get a warrant.”

Ring Will Stop Giving Cops a Free Pass on Warrantless Video Requests

NSO Group, creator of the infamous Pegasus spyware, is spending millions on lobbying in Washington while taking advantage of the crisis in Gaza to paint itself as essential for global security.

On New Year’s Eve, NSO Group—the Israel-based company behind the Pegasus spyware, one of the world’s most sophisticated cyberweapons—quietly released a new transparency report.

The 27-page document is carefully worded—even apologetic—and is intended to demonstrate resilience, progress, and responsibility to further strengthen the company’s human rights compliance program. It claims the company has “opened 19 investigations into allegations of potential product misuse,” which resulted in the “suspension or termination” of six customer accounts. The document even has a dedicated section on journalists, a significant group among as many as 50,000 people worldwide who’ve been targeted by Pegasus, a list that also includes activists, heads of state, and other public figures in more than 50 countries.

NSO Group’s new transparency report—its first in more than two years—arrives amid an apparent push by the spyware vendor to revamp its tarnished image and reverse US regulations that have damaged its business. To achieve its goal, the cyber-intelligence firm is conducting a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign that attempts to position the company’s spyware as essential for global security.

While an NSO spokesperson tells WIRED that the report “underscores the company’s ongoing commitment to human rights and adherence to ethical standards, while enabling its clients to keep the public safe,” those who have investigated the company’s practices express skepticism about its claims.

“It’s not a transparency report in any meaningful way,” says David Kaye, a University of California, Irvine law professor who has scrutinized the company’s policies as the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. “It mainly repackages preexisting defenses and statements that NSO Group has put forward to promote its work and brand itself within the commercial spyware sector.”

NSO Group has only published one other transparency report, in June 2021, which civil society largely regarded as a missed opportunity to provide meaningful information about the alarming human rights impacts of its products. The latest transparency report arrives after several bumpy years for the company. In the aftermath of the 2021 Pegasus revelations, the United States government placed the spyware vendor on an Entity List in November 2021, meaning it cannot receive American investment without specific government approval. Subsequently, the company reportedly went into financial freefall, narrowly avoiding defaulting on $500 million in debt. According to Bloomberg, NSO management considered selling the business.

In August 2022, then CEO Shalev Hulio stepped down, naming COO Yaron Shohat as a successor while laying off 100 employees. Following a forced restructuring by its lenders, cofounder Omri Lavie emerged—via the Luxembourg-based Dufresne Holdings—as NSO’s new owner in May 2023. Amid this upheaval, US president Joe Biden issued an executive order, in March 2023, that prohibits federal departments and agencies from using commercial spyware. In June 2023, the White House issued a warning to US firms interested in acquiring NSO assets on the grounds that doing so could pose a counterintelligence threat to the US government.

Then Hamas attacked Israel. Since then, NSO has been in a position to tangibly demonstrate the value of tools like Pegasus in conflict situations. According to press reports, the cyber-intelligence firm has volunteered—along with Candiru, an NSO competitor that’s also blacklisted by the US—to help Israel’s security services track people kidnapped by Hamas.

“People from the government—both in Israel and outside of Israel—now understand much better why they are needed,” an insider with direct overview of NSO’s operations reportedly told Axios in November.

By seizing that opportunity, NSO appears to be trying to rebrand itself as being on the side of the “good guys,” make inroads with the Biden administration, and ultimately reverse the ban on its products. To succeed in its image-rehabilitation efforts, the spyware vendor has enlisted multiple public affairs consultancies and law firms, including government relations firm Chartwell Strategy Group and law firms Paul Hastings LLP, Steptoe, and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, according to lobbying disclosure documents. In the past three years, NSO had also enlisted the services of Bluelight Strategies and Cherie Blair’s Omnia Strategy in the UK.

“NSO Group engaged multiple firms, which is not uncommon but can be a reflection of the complexity of its influence efforts,” says Anna Massoglia, a researcher at the nonprofit OpenSecrets, which tracks US political spending. According to an OpenSecrets analysis of Lobbying Disclosure Act and Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, NSO has spent a total of $3.1 million in lobbying Washington since 2020. Of that, at least $897,000 was spent in 2023 alone, with payments for the final months of the year still being reported.

The lobbying efforts have primarily focussed on pro-Israel Republicans—but not exclusively. “Foreign agents working for NSO Group have also recently reported contacting officials at the Executive Office of the President and Congress as part of these efforts,” says Massoglia.

On November 7, Paul Hastings LLP sent a letter on behalf of NSO to request an urgent meeting with US secretary of state Antony Blinken and other State Department officials, emphasizing that “the ongoing security situation in Israel and the Middle East—and worldwide—once again highlight the necessity and urgency of employing cyber intelligence technology.”

So far, NSO’s efforts to fall back into Washington’s good graces appear to have had little effect. “Despite their pressure, these campaigns have only had varying influence,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The harms from spyware are well known, and there are only so many ways companies can spin the benefits of software that is inherently intrusive and rights-violating.”

According to a senior Biden administration official who spoke to Politico in November, any changes to the US government’s sanction policy on NSO Group are unlikely. “Without a change to this rule, NSO’s future \[US\] market potential is very, very constrained,” says Feldstein. Still, NSO needs to invest in lobbying, public relations, and transparency exercises to carry on doing business globally.

“NSO’s business model depends on chasing new customers and proliferating spyware for profit. That’s the growth model, and it will inevitably put spyware in the hands of abusers. And they show no signs of abandoning it,” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who has been instrumental in exposing NSO Group’s products. “By the way, the last time NSO published a transparency report, it was followed by years of abuse scandals.”

While in the US, the Entity List “has sent shivers to larger spyware companies regarding potential consequences for bad behavior,” Feldstein says that there are ways to get around it, such as by working exports through Europe and other countries with more lax export control rules. For example, Cyprus is the only member of the EU that does not participate in the Wassenaar Arrangement, a multilateral export control regime signed by 42 countries that aims to control the sale of arms and technologies including spyware.

Weak legislation at the EU level also allows spyware to spread. The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which passed a preliminary vote in December, clearly states that EU member states may deploy spyware under certain conditions. Digital rights defenders have stressed that the retention of the national security exemption in the provisional agreement text enables EU governments to potentially deploy spyware against journalists outside the protective framework of EU law.

“EMFA is not perfect, but it at least tries to limit the deployment of such tools,” EU lawmaker Hannah Neumann tells WIRED. She adds that many members of the European Parliament’s inquiry committee on spyware, of which she was also part, “were frustrated” that the European Commission has not put forward a legislative proposal on how to fix loopholes.

Worth an estimated $12 billion as of 2022, the global spyware industry is likely to continue to do everything it can to stay in business. “As pressure has grown to curtail spyware companies, this has caused them to push even harder to maintain their markets,” says Carnegie’s Feldstein.

Even if high-profile firms like NSO Group were put out of business—admittedly an unlikely outcome—this would still not shut down the spyware market. Feldstein believes that this would instead hasten decentralization and increase opportunities for boutique firms to fill in the gap. “As long as the demand and money are there,” he says, “firms will seek these contracts.”

Notorious Spyware Maker NSO Group Is Quietly Plotting a Comeback

The company says it wants to protect you from “viruses.” Experts are skeptical.

Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company's controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third-party ink. Speaking to CNBC Television, he said, "We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, \[the virus can\] go to the printer, \[and then\] from the printer, go to the network."

That frightening scenario could help explain why HP, which was hit this month with another lawsuit over its Dynamic Security system, insists on deploying it to printers.

To investigate, I turned to Ars Technica senior security editor Dan Goodin. He told me that he didn't know of any attacks actively used in the wild that are capable of using a cartridge to infect a printer.

Goodin also put the question to Mastodon, and cybersecurity professionals, many with expertise in embedded-device hacking, were decidedly skeptical.

HP’s Evidence

Unsurprisingly, Lores' claim comes from HP-backed research. The company's bug bounty program tasked researchers from Bugcrowd with determining if it's possible to use an ink cartridge as a cyberthreat. HP argued that ink cartridge microcontroller chips, which are used to communicate with the printer, could be an entryway for attacks.

As detailed in a 2022 article from research firm Actionable Intelligence, a researcher in the program found a way to hack a printer via a third-party ink cartridge. The researcher was reportedly unable to perform the same hack with an HP cartridge.

Shivaun Albright, HP's chief technologist of print security, said at the time:

> A researcher found a vulnerability over the serial interface between the cartridge and the printer. Essentially, they found a buffer overflow. That’s where you have got an interface that you may not have tested or validated well enough, and the hacker was able to overflow into memory beyond the bounds of that particular buffer. And that gives them the ability to inject code into the device.

Albright added that the malware “remained on the printer in memory” after the cartridge was removed.

HP acknowledges that there's no evidence of such a hack occurring in the wild. Still, because chips used in third-party ink cartridges are reprogrammable (their “code can be modified via a resetting tool right in the field,” according to Actionable Intelligence), they’re less secure, the company says. The chips are said to be programmable so that they can still work in printers after firmware updates.

HP also questions the security of third-party ink companies' supply chains, especially compared to its own supply chain security, which is ISO/IEC-certified.

So HP did find a theoretical way for cartridges to be hacked, and it's reasonable for the company to issue a bug bounty to identify such a risk. But its solution for this threat was announced _before_ it showed there could be a threat. HP added ink cartridge security training to its bug bounty program in 2020, and the above research was released in 2022. HP started using Dynamic Security in 2016, ostensibly to solve the problem that it sought to prove exists years later.

Further, there's a sense from cybersecurity professionals that Ars spoke with that even if such a threat exists, it would take a high level of resources and skills, which are usually reserved for targeting high-profile victims. Realistically, the vast majority of individual consumers and businesses shouldn't have serious concerns about ink cartridges being used to hack their machines.

Whose Job Is It to Make HP Printers Secure?

With Dynamic Security, HP claims to be providing a response to cyberthreats against ink cartridges. But its response is to inconvenience customers rather than beef up HP printers to be invulnerable to remote code execution via ink cartridges.

In response to Bugcrowd's research, HP issued a security update in 2022. Despite this, Albright claimed at the time that it still wasn’t safe for customers to use third-party ink because HP could “never guarantee that every interface with a non-HP cartridge on our device will be free of bugs and security vulnerabilities.”

Even if it's theoretically possible for hackers to leverage ink cartridges, it's a minimal concern, and there are far more pressing security threats to printers than third-party ink. Many easier ways exist for a diligent hacker to get into a printer user's network, including by exploiting unfixed software vulnerabilities.

Further, with HP firmware updates becoming associated with printers suddenly not working, we've seen reports of users avoiding printer updates and encouraging others to do the same, which could result in users rejecting important security updates.

An HP spokesperson declined to comment on these matters.

The Real Focus: Protecting IP

Lores' initial response to CNBC Television's question about the lawsuit may be telling. The CEO responded to dictated consumer complaints by highlighting HP's own needs:

> It's important to protect our IP. There is a lot of IP that we build in the inks of the printers, in the printers themselves ... And what we’re doing is, when we identify cartridges that are violating our IP, we stop the printer from work\[ing\].

When HP first announced Dynamic Security in 2016, it claimed that the feature would deliver "the best consumer experience" and protect customers from cartridges "that infringe on our IP." Eight years and several abrupt firmware updates later, the former seems like it has taken a backseat to the latter.

Lores told CNBC Television that non-HP ink can create "all sort\[s\] of issues," saying that printers may stop working if a customer uses ink that is not "designed" to work with HP printers.

Of course, third-party ink manufacturers would have you believe that their ink is meant to work with the printer brands on its products' boxes. But depending on the quality of the product, you might find inconsistent results with third-party ink cartridges.

While brand recognition and reliability could be good reasons for someone to opt for an HP-brand cartridge over a third party's, such decisions are typically left to customers, not forced via firmware updates. Companies like HP can expect to be rewarded for superior products, support, and warranties, but customers who would rather risk quality to save money would prefer to have options.

HP Wants Printing to Be a Subscription

It's clear that HP's tactics are meant to coax HP printer owners into committing to HP ink, which helps the company drive recurring revenue and makes up for money lost when the printers are sold. Lores confirmed in his interview that HP loses money when it sells a printer and makes money through supplies.

But HP's ambitions don't end there. It envisions a world where all of its printer customers also subscribe to an HP program offering ink and other printer-related services. "Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription. This is really what we have been driving," Lores said.

HP has been largely focused on pushing its monthly ink subscription program, Instant Ink, over the years. In December, HP CFO Marie Myers noted that subscription models like Instant Ink can bring "20 percent uplift on the value of that customer because you're locking that person" in. In its most recent financial report, HP named Instant Ink one of its "key growth areas."

When asked about concerns that HP is driving up the price of printer ink, Lores told CNBC Television, "This is part of the business model that has been developed over time," noting that HP printer boxes disclose which printers use Dynamic Security. HP's website also notes which printers use Dynamic Security.

But even if you have that information, it's unclear whether an HP printer will immediately work with third-party ink. HP sells printers that work with third-party ink now, but the company says it may update them in the future to "block cartridges using a non-HP chip or modified or non-HP circuitry from working in the printer, including cartridges that work today."

Who’s Investing in Whom?

HP has faced numerous lawsuits in relation to blocking device functionality due to third-party ink and has paid out millions as a result. So why is it still continuing down this road? That might be partially explained by the company's perspective on the vendor-customer relationship.

When people buy an HP printer, they consider it an investment. But HP thinks that when you buy a printer, the company is investing in you.

As Lores put it:

> This is something we announced a few years ago that our goal was to reduce the number of what we call unprofitable customers. Because every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We're investing \[in\] that customer, and if this customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.

HP expects customers who already gave it money for a printer to continue paying the company for years. HP customers expect their purchase to pay off in the long term without stipulations on ink branding. If HP can't find a way to make printer customers feel like their purchase is a benefit rather than a commitment to giving HP money regularly, people may eventually stop thinking that HP printers are a worthy investment.

When reached for comment, an HP spokesperson told Ars, in part, that HP "offers a wide range of printing products and solutions for customers to choose from, including Instant Ink" and "regularly" expands its offerings "to create more value" for customers.

You can watch CNBC Television's interview below:

_This story originally appeared on_ _Ars Technica._

HP CEO Says They Brick Printers That Use Third-Party Ink Because of … Hackers

Apple’s iOS 17.3 introduces Stolen Device Protection to iPhones, which could stop phone thieves from taking over your accounts. Here’s how to enable it right now.

Apple today launched a new tool for iPhones to help reduce what a thief with your phone and passcode can access. The feature, called Stolen Device Protection, adds extra layers of protection to your iPhone when someone tries to access or change sensitive settings on your device. If someone tries to access passwords stored in Apple’s keychain, for instance, they won’t be able to unless they also use a fingerprint or the phone’s face recognition to prove they’re the legitimate owner.

You don't need to look far to find stories of stolen phones. In London, a phone is stolen every six minutes. Subreddits are littered with people having their phones snatched by thieves. In some of the most extreme cases, crooks can also take the passcodes—forcibly, or by peering over someone’s shoulder—and then steal a phone and unlock it. Social media accounts, passwords, and financial data can all be put at risk.

Stolen Device Protection is included with iOS 17.3, the latest iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system, which was released today. The feature should be high on your list to enable. It better protects your data—without you having to do anything—and has the potential to disrupt thieves. The move from Apple, according to cybersecurity experts, is a positive one and adds to the protections that already accompany passcodes.

The stolen iPhone protection is “likely to act as another barrier and put more pressure on thieves when targeting victims,” says Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity adviser at security firm Eset and a former police computer crime investigator. “Selling phones will always be big business among organized crime groups, but criminals will just need to work harder on their craft now.”

When you turn on Stolen Device Protection, Apple puts extra limits on some settings when your iPhone isn’t at a familiar location, such as your home or work. If someone unlocks your phone and tries to change these settings, they’ll have to use Face ID or Touch ID. So if a thief has your phone and passcode, they won’t be able to change the settings unless they have your biometric information too, which is not straightforward to clone and fool the systems that power them.

These extra checks will appear when someone tries to access passwords or passkeys you’ve saved in iCloud’s keychain, use payment methods saved in Safari, turn off Lost Mode, erase your phone, use your phone in the setup of a new Apple device, apply for a new Apple Card, view your Apple Card’s virtual number, or transfer money with Apple Cash.

There’s also a second layer of checks for even more sensitive information. If your phone is not at a familiar location, Apple will also put in place a one-hour “security delay” after using your biometrics. When this one-hour delay is up, your biometrics are needed again to change the settings. (Your iPhone will still be accessible during this hour.)

This hour delay applies to attempts to change your Apple ID password, sign out of Apple ID, or update Apple ID account security settings, such as removing a trusted device. The delay is also in place if someone tries to remove Face ID or Touch ID accounts, change your iPhone passcode, reset your settings, disable the Find My tool, and turn off Stolen Device Protection itself. If a thief has your phone, there’s a chance they’ll want to change these settings quickly to either take over your phone or online accounts, and the delay may reduce their ability to do so. Moore says the extra hour’s delay adds a “greatly appreciated layer of security.”

Turning on the iPhone’s Stolen Device Protection is simple—it’s just one small toggle in your phone’s settings. You need to make sure your iPhone is updated to iOS 17.3. Open the **Settings** app, scroll to **Face ID & Passcode**, then to **Stolen Device Protection**, and turn the switch on.

With the new feature, Apple is increasingly relying on biometrics, through Touch ID and Face ID, as a way of proving the person with your phone is actually you. “Apple now has a decade of experience with biometrics on hundreds of millions of devices, and its confidence in them seems to be growing,” says Mark Stockley, a cybersecurity expert at security firm Malwarebytes. Traditionally, he says, a password or passcode has been the option that’s turned to when biometrics fail to work. With this new feature, the roles are being reversed, indicating a greater trust in the technologies. “This could be a step towards a passcode-less future,” Stockley says.

While Stolen Device Protection is a step forward, it doesn’t protect everything on your phone if a thief gets hold of it and your passcode. It’s worth making sure your data is backed up, and some apps, such as WhatsApp, will allow you to add another (ideally different) passcode or PIN, on top of your phone’s passcode, before allowing someone into the apps.

Broadly speaking, if your iPhone is stolen—beyond contacting the cops—you’ll also want to visit Apple’s iCloud to take back control of your device. “Start by changing your Apple ID password and ticking the option to sign you out of devices and websites you’re currently logged in to,” Stockley says. Then, within iCloud’s Find Devices settings, you can mark your phone as lost and remotely wipe it. Hopefully, Stolen Device Protection’s features will never need to come to your rescue, but for every person who turns it on, it makes thieves’ lives just that little bit harder.

Apple iOS 17.3: How to Turn on iPhone's New Stolen Device Protection

Police around the US say they're justified to run DNA-generated 3D models of faces through facial recognition tools to help crack cold cases. Everyone but the cops thinks that’s a bad idea.

In 2017, detectives working a cold case at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California’s Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs—a company that says it can turn DNA into a face.

Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.

The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.

The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.

In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.

“Using DNA found at the crime scene, Parabon Labs reconstructed a possible suspect’s facial features,” the detective explained in a request for “analytical support” sent to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a so-called fusion center that facilitates collaboration among federal, state, and local police departments. “I have a photo of the possible suspect and would like to use facial recognition technology to identify a suspect/lead.”

The detective’s request to run a DNA-generated estimation of a suspect’s face through facial recognition tech has not previously been reported. Found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, it appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face algorithmically generated from crime-scene DNA.

It likely won’t be the last.

For facial recognition experts and privacy advocates, the East Bay detective’s request, while dystopian, was also entirely predictable. It emphasizes the ways that, without oversight, law enforcement is able to mix and match technologies in unintended ways, using untested algorithms to single out suspects based on unknowable criteria.

“It’s really just junk science to consider something like this,” Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED. Running facial recognition with unreliable inputs, like an algorithmically generated face, is more likely to misidentify a suspect than provide law enforcement with a useful lead, she argues. “There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place,” Lynch says. “It’s very dangerous, because it puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit.”

It is unknown whether the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center honored the East Bay detective’s request. The NCRIC did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment about the outcome of the detective's facial recognition request. Captain Terrence Cotcher of the East Bay Regional Park District PD would not comment on the identification request, citing what he describes as an active homicide investigation. However, the executive director of the NCRIC, Mike Sena, told The Markup in 2021 that whenever the fusion center gets facial recognition requests, it will run a search.

For Parabon NanoLabs, if the department ran the predicted face through facial recognition, it isn’t just a violation of the company’s terms of service—it’s a terrible idea.

Parabon NanoLabs, founded in 2008, primarily focuses on forensic genetic genealogy services for law enforcement, a process that involves comparing DNA data with profiles in genealogy databases to locate potential suspects or victims. In 2012, the company received a grant from the US Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency to explore DNA phenotyping, predicting a person's appearance based only on their DNA. According to a 2020 article in _Nature_, the DOD was initially interested in developing phenotyping technology to re-create the faces of people who made improvised explosive devices, using traces of DNA left on the bomb fragments. Parabon pitched an ambitious method that involved machine learning to receive its grant.

Ellen Greytak, the director of bioinformatics at Parabon NanoLabs, says the company uses machine learning to build predictive models “for each part of the face.” The models are trained on the DNA data of more than 1,000 research volunteers and paired with 3D scans of their faces. Each scanned face, Greytak says, has 21,000 phenotypes—observable physical traits—that their models crunch in order to figure out how parts of a DNA sample affect a face’s appearance.

Parabon says it can confidently predict the color of a person's hair, eyes, and skin, along with the amount of freckles they have and the general shape of their face. These phenotypes form the basis of the face renderings the company generates for law enforcement. Parabon’s methods have not been peer-reviewed, and scientists are skeptical about how feasible predicting face shape even is.

In response to questions about the technology's accuracy, Parabon NanoLabs vice president Paula Armentrout tells WIRED that, while the details of its methods are not public, the company has presented its work at conferences and has tested its technology on thousands of samples. She adds that the company posts on its website “every single composite that is publicly disclosed by a customer, so people can draw their own conclusions about how well our technology works.”

Greytak characterizes the company’s face predictions as something more like a description of a suspect than an exact replica of their face. “What we are predicting is more like—given this person’s sex and ancestry, will they have wider-set eyes than average,” she says. “There’s no way you can get individual identifications from that.”

When Parabon NanoLabs launched its face-prediction service around 2015, its terms of service did not explicitly ban clients from using predictions with facial recognition. Soon after launching, however, the company’s law enforcement clients started asking about the viability of running phenotype-generated faces through facial recognition tools. “We were surprised when we heard this,” Greytak says. “It’s just not the intended purpose of the composite images.” In 2016, the company added a clause to its terms prohibiting customers from using facial recognition on its Snapshot Phenotype Reports. However, Armentrout tells WIRED that the company “does not have a way to ensure compliance” with its TOS.

Eight years later, after generating scores of face predictions for law enforcement, some of Parabon NanoLabs’ clients see little reason to not consider using face recognition on these algorithmically generated faces. Officers at all of the departments that WIRED contacted say it should at least be an option.

Jason McDonald is a detective with the Aurora, Colorado, police department’s Major Crime-Homicide Unit. In 2016, his department asked Parabon to use DNA found on the scenes of four 1984 homicides to predict the face of a suspect. McDonald tells WIRED that he believes that running a predicted face through facial recognition could be “justified” and “possibly a useful tool.”

Detective Edward Silver of the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department in Michigan agrees. His department used Parabon NanoLabs in 2021 to generate the face of a woman whose severely burned body was found in a dumpster in 2003. Silver tells WIRED that he believes the Snapshot Phenotype Reports are accurate enough for facial recognition software.

Representatives from sheriff's offices in Lake County, Florida, and DeKalb County, Illinois, also say they would consider using Parabon NanoLabs’ predicted faces with facial recognition tools. Sheriff Andrew Sullivan of the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office says in an email that “if there was DNA evidence that was used in the development of Snapshot, yes, we would use that information to try and develop any lead that we had further to solve any homicide.”

Haley Williams, a communications manager with the Boise Police Department in Idaho, tells WIRED in an email that the decision to use facial recognition with an algorithmically generated face would be made on a “case-by-case” basis. She added, however, that the department would “never rely solely on any one piece of evidence and would only use it as a tool to help direct us to other leads or evidence.”

“These are decades-old cases that we have been working,” says a cold-case detective who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak to the media. “I know that the Parabon face isn’t perfect, but why wouldn’t we use every tool available to us to try and catch a killer?” Asked if he tried facial recognition with the predicted face, the detective declined to answer, but says, “the family deserves to know that we tried everything.”

Lynch, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED that while she is sympathetic to detectives wanting to bring closure for the family, the risks of misidentification with this use case are too great. “I think it goes to show a complete misunderstanding about the high-risk errors of facial recognition,” Lynch says. “It’s surprising to me that cops think this kind of technology will produce leads that they can actually use.”

Phenotyping is often a last resort that departments try only after they’ve exhausted other leads. According to Parabon NanoLabs, the majority of cases it works on do not actually get to the facial composite stage. “I joke that my phenotyping can tell you if your suspect has blue eyes, but my genealogist can tell you the guy’s address,” Greytak says.

The fact that law enforcement investigators consider using these predictions in conjunction with facial recognition speaks to a general lack of oversight over investigatory tools, experts say. There are no federal rules that limit the types of images police can use with face recognition software, and it’s up to both the police departments and the facial recognition vendor to implement and enforce safeguards.

According to a report released in September by the US Government Accountability Office, only 5 percent of the 196 FBI agents who have access to facial recognition technology from outside vendors have completed any training on how to properly use the tools. The report notes that the agency also lacks any internal policies for facial recognition to safeguard against privacy and civil liberties abuses.

In the past few years, facial recognition has improved considerably. In 2018, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology tested face recognition algorithms on a mug shot database of 12 million people, it found that 99.9 percent of searches identified the correct person. However, the NIST also found disparities in how the algorithms it tested performed across demographic groups.

Crucially, the NIST tested these algorithms only with high-quality images like driver's license and passport photos; law enforcement is often less discerning. A 2019 report from Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology written by Clare Garvie, a facial recognition expert and privacy lawyer, found that law enforcement agencies nationwide have used facial recognition tools on images that include blurry surveillance camera shots, manipulated photos of suspects, and even composite sketches created by traditional artists.

According to an internal New York Police Department presentation cited by Garvie in her report, NYPD detective Tom Markiewicz wrote in 2018 that the department has tried running face recognition on forensic sketches and found that “sketches do not work.” In another infamous example that Garvie cites in her report, a detective from the NYPD’s Facial Identification Section, after noting that a suspect looked like the actor Woody Harrelson, put a photo of the actor through the department’s facial recognition tool.

“Because modern facial recognition algorithms are trained neural networks, we just don’t know exactly what criteria the systems use to identify a face,” Garvie, who now works at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, tells WIRED. “Daisy chaining unreliable or imprecise black-box tools together is simply going to produce unreliable results,” she says.

“We should know this by now.”

Source

Wired