New testimony from defectors reveals pervasive surveillance and monitoring of limited internet connections. For millions of others, the internet simply doesn't exist.

For 25 million North Koreans, the internet is an impossibility. Only a few thousand privileged members of the hermit kingdom’s society can access the global internet, while even the country’s heavily censored internal intranet is out of reach for the majority of the population. Getting access to free and open information isn’t an option.

New research from South Korea-based human rights organization People for Successful Corean Reunification (Pscore) details the reality for those who—in very limited circumstances—manage to get online in North Korea. The report reveals a days-long approval process to gain internet access, after which monitors sit next to people while they browse and approve their activities every five minutes. Even then, what can be accessed reveals little about the world outside North Korea’s borders.

Documentation from the NGO is being presented today at the human rights conference RightsCon and sheds light on the regime with the most limited internet freedoms, which fall far below the restrictive and surveilled internet access in China and Iran. For millions of people in North Korea, the internet simply doesn’t exist.

“I was taught about the World Wide Web, and even had to memorize it for an exam, but I only knew about the internet in theory,” one North Korean defector who left the country told Pscore researchers. “I knew it was a sort of network where you can search but didn’t actually know what it was.” Another said they didn’t “know the concept of Wi-Fi,” let alone have any clue about Google.

Getting an accurate picture of what happens within Kim Jong Un’s sealed-off state is incredibly challenging. Officials control all information flows and present state propaganda to the world. Analysts turn to those who escape and defect, at great personal risk, for a glimpse of North Korean reality. Pscore’s internet freedom report is based on 24 face-to-face interviews with defectors and a survey of 158 others. All left North Korea between 2012 and 2022.

The report says North Korean researcher Kim Suk-Han—all defector names within the research are pseudonyms for safety reasons—used the internet five times when they were living in the country. They had used the internet while on a trip to China and so had high expectations, they told the researchers. Instead, they faced limited access and constant surveillance.

“A librarian sits between two internet users and continuously monitors what people on both sides are searching up,” Kim said in testimony to the researchers. “Every five minutes, the screen freezes automatically, and the librarian must do a fingerprint authentication to allow further internet use.” A state security officer was also always nearby, they said.

People were allowed to use the internet for an hour, and if someone wanted more time, they would need to obtain new permission, Kim said. It took around two days to get permission from authorities to use the internet, a task requiring approvals from various officials. If someone applied too often, they would be made to wait, Kim said. “Every Korean website is blocked, and only Chinese or English websites are available.”

Over the past decade, there has been an increased number of digital devices in North Korea. Around 50 to 80 percent of adults may now have mobile phones, allowing them to text and call family members. Yet the use of these phones is highly controlled—data speeds are low, with devices capturing screenshots every few minutes and code that only allows government-approved content to be shown. And internet penetration is at nowhere near the same level.

“North Korean people cannot use it, not because of the infrastructure or not because of the country’s poor conditions,” says Nam Bada, the secretary general of Pscore and editor of the report. “It is only because of the governmental policy.”

A few dozen families with connections to Kim Jong-Un and some foreigners have unrestricted access to the global internet, while a “few thousand” people—including government officials, researchers, and students studying IT—can access a surveillance-heavy version of it, according to the report and previous research. North Koreans like Kim who are allowed some foreign travel, usually for business, can sometimes access the global web while abroad.

Mitch Haszard, a senior threat intelligence analyst at security firm Recorded Future, which has previously analyzed North Korean internet traffic, says Chinese and Russian internet service providers hook the country up to the global network, and access by foreign visitors makes up some of what can be seen externally. This may have changed during the Covid-19 pandemic when there were fewer foreigners in North Korea and its borders were closed.

According to multiple defectors quoted in the Pscore report, global internet access is only available in certain locations and buildings within North Korea. One person claimed internet connections at the National Academy of Sciences in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, were only available on the second floor, and just eight computers were connected. Around five people were granted use, they said.

Another defector told the Pscore researchers that when they got permission to travel to Pyongyang to use the internet, they tried to download medical research papers but could only access the titles of the papers and the author names. “I knew the concept of the global internet when I was in North Korea, but I didn’t know that so much information was exchanged through it,” said Shin Yong-Rok, another defector.

Martyn Williams is a senior fellow with the Stimson Center and 38 North project who has extensively studied technology in North Korea but was not involved with the report. Williams says the testimonies track with those of other defectors but add new details about the levels of surveillance people face. In general, Williams says, internet access “appears to be available for officially sanctioned uses, such as some universities, research establishments, and likely some trade organizations and other establishments.” University students Williams spoke to have previously said that they are required to state why they need to use the internet and are monitored when they get online.

Williams points to a 2020 North Korean law that has ramped up the country’s efforts to stop foreign information from being accessed in the country. In recent years, outside information—including TV shows and South Korean content—has been smuggled across the border using USB drives, giving people a glimpse of the outside world. “The new law levies harsh penalties, up to and including death, on people caught with foreign information,” Williams says. (In 2021 it was reported that a man who smuggled copies of the dystopian Netflix thriller _Squid Game_ into North Korea and sold them was sentenced to death.)

While tightly controlled access to the internet is available for a few thousand “elites,” the local intranet is marginally more accessible—in theory, at least. Known as Kwangmyong, the intranet offers only a handful of websites. “Citizens can access \[the intranet\] from their phones or from computers,” Williams says. “Over the years, we’ve seen lots of websites shown and offered, and it appears that many major sectors of the government have their own sites with official information.” Some online shopping has recently become available, according to reports.

Defectors told Pscore that intranet prices were generally too high for most people, meaning a lot of access happens at official buildings, such as universities and libraries, where surveillance levels are high. People willing to take the risk can try to get around the system. “I’ve secretly played the game \[_Dota_\] twice through the intranet with people in another region,” said one defector, given the pseudonym Jung Woo-Jin. “I’ve only played three times. If you play more, your IP will be exposed by using more than a certain time, then your place will be recorded.” Most people included in the study said intranet use is impractical.

Pscore’s report lists around two dozen recommendations, addressed to both North Korea and international countries, for improving internet freedom. The report pushes for more connectivity within the country, advising North Korea to stop monitoring people and to connect the intranet to the global internet. If a full internet connection cannot be provided, a censored model like China’s would be a better last resort, the report says.

The report adds that countries should work to create a “legal framework” for international access and recognize internet access as a law-backed human right. Nam, the Pscore secretary general, says increasing internet access could benefit health care and education and improve people’s human rights, such as freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.

Globally, 5.3 billion people regularly use the internet, or around 66 percent of Earth’s population. For years, official bodies have declared internet access to be a human right—with the United Nations saying there should be full connectivity by 2030. “The real problem is how to translate these commitments into reality,” says Barbora Bukovská, senior director of law and policy at human rights organization Article 19. “This includes issues such as making the internet affordable, getting people online, acquiring minimum digital skills and literacy, or achieving equality in access for marginalized groups and those at risk of discrimination.”

Bukovská says North Korea’s human rights record indicates that mandating internet access at a global level would likely not make much difference—bigger change within the country would be needed to implement such changes. But for those who have managed to leave the country, the difference is stark. “People will long for any new information, such as science and technology information,” defector Kim Suk-Han told researchers, “which are accessible through the internet.”

The Bizarre Reality of Getting Online in North Korea

UT-Austin will join a growing movement to launch cybersecurity clinics for cities and small businesses that often fall through the cracks.

The idea for the UT-Austin project emerged from discussions in CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, a group of experts from the private sector, academia, civil society, and local government. During conversations about a university running a municipal cyber helpline, Austin quickly emerged as the ideal candidate, thanks to its already popular 311 service and the support of two committee members: Steve Adler, who was then Austin’s mayor, and Chesney, an influential UT faculty member.

CISA director Jen Easterly has championed the project and recently told the advisory committee that her agency will consider launching a nationwide cyber 311 system after evaluating Austin’s new clinic and similar efforts.

“The UT-Austin pilot is helping us better understand how we can provide cybersecurity services for small and medium-size businesses across our nation,” Easterly says in a statement, adding that she is “truly excited” about it.

Building a Clinic

UT-Austin’s clinic will take the form of a two-semester course. In the fall, Francesca Lockhart, a former top Texas homeland security official Chesney recruited to lead the project, will teach students cybersecurity skills and partner them with local organizations and businesses, giving students time to learn how those organizations operate and what they need. In the spring, teams of students will then create and implement cybersecurity improvement plans for their clients.

Lockhart’s curriculum will cover lessons like inventorying the devices on a network, scanning for and fixing known vulnerabilities, configuring a firewall, conducting penetration testing, and understanding the Linux operating system and the Python programming language, which are widely used in diagnosing and fixing security issues. 

The 20 people in the inaugural class include students majoring in business and computer science, but also those studying biochemistry and international relations. Lockhart is still evaluating a variety of potential clients, including small businesses; nonprofits serving vulnerable populations in Austin; neighboring school districts and city governments; and startups focused on fighting hunger, disease, and other social ills.

Lockhart says the clinic represents “a great opportunity to get students real-world career experience and fill the cybersecurity workforce gap while also serving the needs of some of these under-resourced organizations.”

Any expansion to a 311-type service is far off. “You need to walk before you run,” Chesney says.

Expanding the Scope

To Steve Adler, Austin’s former mayor, a cyber helpline would be a natural extension of the UT-Austin project.

Austin’s 311 service already gets calls from people worried about phishing scams and other low-level cyberattacks. The next step would be to create a referral system so 311 operators could turn certain calls over to UT-Austin students trained to handle a wide range of common incidents. “It might expand the scope of what people think would be covered by a 311 call,” says Adler, who served as mayor from 2015 to 2023.

Another state is already forging ahead with this idea. Later this year, Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts will launch a security operations center (SOC) to answer emergency calls from the community. The 24/7 SOC, created in partnership with a state-funded consortium, will be staffed by professional cyber experts, but students will be able to observe and participate in their work.

The Bold Plan to Create Cyber 311 Hotlines

Instead of scanning iCloud for illegal content, Apple's tech will locally flag inappropriate images for kids. And adults are getting an opt-in nudes filter, too.

In December, Apple announced that it was killing a controversial iCloud photo-scanning tool the company had devised to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in what it said was a privacy-preserving way. Apple then said that its anti-CSAM efforts would instead center around its “Communication Safety” features for children, initially announced in August 2021. And at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino today, Apple debuted expansions to the mechanism, including an additional feature tailored to adults.

Communication Safety scans messages locally on young users' devices to flag content that children are receiving or sending in messages on iOS that contain nudity. Apple announced today that the feature is also expanding to FaceTime video messages, Contact Posters in the Phone app, the Photos picker tool where users choose photos or videos to send, and AirDrop. The feature's on-device processing means that Apple never sees the content being flagged, but beginning this fall, Communication Safety will be turned on by default for all child accounts—kids under 13—in a Family Sharing plan. Parents can elect to disable to feature if they choose.

“The Communication Safety feature is one where we really want to give the child a moment to pause and hopefully get disrupted out what might be a grooming conversation,” says Apple's head of user privacy Erik Neuenschwander. “So it’s meant to be high friction. It’s meant to be that there is an answer which we think is likely right in that child’s situation, which is not to move forward, and we really want to make sure they’re educated.”

Apple said in December that it planned to make an application programming interface (API) available so third-party developers could easily integrate Communication Safety into their apps and use it to detect child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. The API, known as the Sensitive Content Analysis framework, is available now for developers. Platforms like Discord have already said that they plan to incorporate it into their iOS apps.

A Communication Safety prompt for a child's account.

Photograph: Apple

One criticism of anti-CSAM initiatives like Communication Safety is that they don't have full coverage across apps and services to flag content and protect children everywhere, potentially allowing communications with abusers to slip through. And this is precisely why Apple says it invested heavily to develop a robust API that app makers can easily incorporate into their software.

“There was a lot of work that we had to do to create this model,” Neuenschwander says. “We can make that investment once and then have that be leveraged across the platform for potentially all of the applications our users use.”

An opt-in Sensitive Content Warning for an adult's account.

Photograph: Apple

On top of Communication Safety, Apple says that it has also received feedback about interest in a version of the feature for adults. So today, the company also launched “Sensitive Content Warning,” which similarly uses local scanning to flag and blur images and videos that contain nudity. The feature is optional and controlled in the iOS “Privacy & Security” settings menu. And it's designed to be more subtle than Communication Safety. The goal is to protect adult users from content they don't want to see without being intrusive or unhelpful.

Meaningfully addressing and reducing child sexual abuse online is a complicated and difficult problem. And Apple says that it isn't done exploring and investing in new solutions. But with such high stakes, there's a real urgency for a company like Apple to roll out features that will have an impact and promote their adoption as widely as possible.

Apple Expands Its On-Device Nudity Detection to Combat CSAM

Data from Cloudflare's free digital defense service, Project Galileo, illuminates new links between online and offline attacks.

internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has offered the free web security service Project Galileo for nearly a decade, giving human rights and public interest organizations around the world access to defenses against DDoS attacks and other common online hacking techniques. More than 2,271 websites in 111 countries now use the service, including 81 Ukrainian organizations, the majority of which joined after the Russian invasion in February 2022. The main aim of Project Galileo is simply to utilize Cloudflare’s products and scale for organizations that might not otherwise have any web defenses at all. By examining the threats that different participants are facing, the company hopes to also raise awareness about what could be coming next.

In Ukraine, for example, Cloudflare found that emergency response services in numerous cities that are enrolled in Project Galileo—including those that perform search and rescue; offer medical care; and distribute supplies like food, water, and medicine—face spikes of malicious traffic concurrent with Russian bombings. Many of the other Ukrainian organizations that use Project Galileo are human rights groups or work in independent media and journalism. They often see increases in attacks around moments of international controversy, like when Russia assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council on April 1.

In a report released today, Cloudflare delved into data on attack trends across Project Galileo participants, including those in Ukraine, abortion and reproductive rights organizations, and LGBTQ+ groups. The company says that between July 1, 2022 and May 5, 2023, it mitigated 20 billion attacks against Project Galileo enrollees.

“We’re not specifically placing blame for the sources of the attacks,” says David Belson, Cloudflare’s head of data insight. “But we’re seeing things play out in new and unique ways. In Ukraine, if Russia is trying to attack them physically, and then an actor is trying to prevent them from getting access to the sites that provide emergency resources on the digital side, it’s a new facet in warfare.”

Since last summer, Project Galileo mitigated an average of 790,000 attacks per day against LGBTQ+ organizations and an average of 1.52 million per day against reproductive rights groups, Cloudflare says. In addition to defending against DDoS attacks—firehoses of junk traffic meant to deluge a site and take it down—more and more of the defense Project Galileo provides comes from Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall. The service helps defend sites against actual web application vulnerability exploitation, including hackers’ attempts to launch common attacks like injecting malicious scripts and manipulating databases.

“In those cases, it means that the attacks were less brute force—‘I’m going to try to knock this site down by throwing a load of garbage traffic at it’—and maybe a slightly more mature type of attack, probing to try to find a way in,” Belson says. “The intent then is not to take them down, but to do something arguably more malicious, like exfiltrate data.”

Defending small or under-resourced sites against DDoS attacks is still a key component of Project Galileo’s offering, though. And Cloudflare researchers emphasize that it’s important for sites to have some sort of protection in place, even if they’ve never been targeted before, because sites with low daily traffic, like those that provide resources to small or regional audiences, can so easily be overwhelmed by an unexpected DDoS attack.

“The goal is to provide some background for civil society groups to make them think about what they should be protecting against and show that these threats are real,” says Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare’s vice president and global head of public policy. “We often see attacks against websites if there are things happening in the physical world—controversy about a subject, focus on a particular topic. The organizations that are targeted are the ones that are navigating that.”

Hacks Against Ukraine's Emergency Response Services Rise During Bombings

Internal company documents reveal how the imageboard’s chaotic moderation allowed racism and violence to take over.

On May 14, 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron sent out a link to a select group of online friends. It was an invite to a private Twitch stream, access to his running online diary, and an upload of his 180-page manifesto.

Those who clicked the link saw Gendron sitting in his car, in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. They watched as he lifted his AR-15-style rifle, equipped with a high-capacity magazine, and opened fire. He killed 10 people in just six minutes.

Even before police stopped the massacre and arrested Gendron, the link was being posted to the anonymous imageboard 4chan. On /pol/, the site’s “politically incorrect” board, people commented in real time on the mass shooting. “Why not shoot up the abortion rallys? What a faggot,” one user wrote. Another chimed in: “The kids manifesto is actually pretty good.” Dozens of people who missed the livestream demanded a recording. Others declared it a deep-state false flag operation.

One poster, however, was imploring the site’s users to accept responsibility. “Why is this place so full of hate and anger?” they asked. “It's like a den of inequity \[sic\]. Why don't you people ever express love or compassion?” They uploaded a photo of Payton Gendron, and named the file “the 4chan killer.”

“You made Payton Gentron \[sic\], a sociopathic mass murderer,” they wrote. 

4chan’s moderators soon jumped in and banned the user's account, deleting their comment. The reason for the ban: “Complaining about 4chan.”

The way in which 4chan is managed and moderated is of growing interest among US government officials. The US House of Representatives' January 6 committee subpoenaed 4chan over its role in facilitating the assault on the US Capitol, while investigators with the New York Attorney General’s Office ordered the company to turn over thousands of records to better understand its role in Gendron’s terrorist attack. WIRED obtained a number of internal 4chan documents through a public records request. 

Those documents show how 4chan’s team of moderators—janitors, in their own nomenclature—manage the site. Internal emails, chat logs, and moderation decisions reveal how the site’s janitors have helped shape it in their own image, using their moderation powers to engender 4chan’s particular brand of edgelord white supremacy. In particular, the documents show how the site’s moderators responded to a wave of attention as their website had, once more, been cited as an ideological driver for an act of mass murder. 

More than that, the documents lay bare the degree to which 4chan’s toxic influence is a design, not a bug.

In his manifesto, Gendron credited 4chan with showing him “the truth”—that is, a deeply paranoid and racist belief that “the White race is dying out.” He selected the Tops supermarket specifically because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. 4chan, too, told him what to do about it. Years earlier, browsing the site, he had come across a video of 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant stalking through the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, murdering 51 people.

In launching the attack in Buffalo, Gendron was following in Tarrant’s footsteps. He even liberally plagiarized Tarrant’s manifesto. And he made regular use of 4chan’s insular, hateful lexicon of memes and in-jokes.

While Gendron has pled guilty to murder, domestic terrorism, and hate crimes charges, and is awaiting trial on additional federal charges, the families of some of the victims have filed a lawsuit against a number of social media companies, including 4chan, Discord, Reddit, Snapchat, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. They allege that Gendron’s radicalization was caused by an inability, or outright refusal, by these companies to stem the flow of violent conspiracy theories online.

Many of the companies named, however, do make a concerted effort to remove extremist content. But 4chan is markedly different. Its rules and moderation practices entrench its politics and culture in a major way. What is and isn’t allowed on the imageboard helps explain how it has become a website where racial slurs are used like commas, and where users frequently counsel each other to die by suicide and take as many people with them as they can.

Its rules are simultaneously more onerous and more permissive than other social media sites. 4chan has 17 “Global Rules.” The first forbids any content that violates US law. “Any sort of threat of violence or terroristic acts would violate Global Rule #1,” the 4chan administrators wrote to the New York attorney general.

Another rule, technically, bans racism—except on /b/, 4chan’s “random” board. There, racism is both allowed and encouraged. 4chan leadership confessed to the New York Attorney General’s Office that they take a permissive attitude towards racism on the /pol/ board as well. It is a similar approach to how 4chan handles “My Little Pony” content. (“All pony/brony threads, images, Flashes, and avatars belong on /mlp/,” the rules read.)

The site’s Global Rules are augmented by hundreds of other board-specific rules. In practice, however, 4chan users know that the application of these rules is often arbitrary and that much depends on the moderator enforcing them. The janitors are free to deem just about anything “off-topic,” or to just make up their own rules as they go.

According to 4chan’s filings to the New York Attorney General’s Office, the website regularly issues between 5,000 and 7,000 bans per day. That doesn’t include post deletions that do not result in an IP address ban. The website’s paid administrators submitted over 500 ban records to the state of New York, all of which touched—at least tangentially—on Gendron’s massacre in Buffalo.

Roughly 60 percent of those bans were because posts were off-topic, or on the wrong board. One person, for example, was banned for posting in /k/, the weapons board used by Gendron to pick his gear and prepare for his attack, to ask, “At what point do you people acknowledge we need some sort of restrictions or controls in this country?” The board’s rules state that “All images and discussion should pertain to firearms, military vehicles, knives, realistic mil-sim games, and other weapons.” (/k/ has just one board-specific rule: “All weaponry is welcome.”)

According to the cross-section of bans provided to New York, which were issued in the days after the Buffalo mass shooting, 21 bans were imposed for violating US law. Some of those were, as 4chan pointed out to the Attorney General’s Office, for counseling for further terror attacks. The posts encouraged fellow 4chan users to kill politicians, journalists, law enforcement officials, Jewish and Black people, and to target Pride events. 

In practice, however, the majority of calls for violence on 4chan do not result in bans. Users frequently make calls to instigate a race war—a “boogaloo,” in far-right parlance—or make threats against individuals or whole classes of people. Their vitriol is particularly vile when it comes to Black, queer, and Jewish people.

Users counsel each other to “go full ER”—a reference to Elliot Rodger, who, aged 22, murdered six people at his university in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 before dying by suicide. That kind of encouragement has been reflected back to 4chan by those who follow through on acts of violence. When 25-year-old Alek Minassian rammed a van through a crowd  of people in Toronto, Canada, in 2018, killing 11 and injuring 15, some critically, he uploaded a post to Facebook immediately beforehand, making a convoluted reference to “Sgt 4chan” and the “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Mike Chitwood, the sheriff of Florida’s Volusia County, has gone out of his way to underscore just how prevalent these violent threats are on 4chan. His office has arrested multiple 4chan users for issuing specific threats against the sheriff himself. Users, undeterred and without reprimand from moderators, have responded with posts like: “Kill Sheriff Shitwood.” “Behead Sheriff Shitwood.” “Roundhouse kick Sheriff Shitwood into the concrete.”

One particularly conspiratorial and racist poster, who sported a Nazi flag icon, was more blunt than many of their fellow users about 4chan’s toxic impact: “Hoping some kid reads this.. kinda keeps it in the back of his mind.. then if all things and chances fall in place then those kids may start a boogaloo in the future.”

4chan wasn’t always a hotbed of racial animus and hatred. When its founder, Chris Poole, ran the site, he was locked in a constant effort to keep it from sliding into racist chaos. Right until he quit the site in 2015, Poole actively resisted its emerging political streak. Initially, the imageboard trended towards a progressive libertarianism epitomized by the hacktivist group Anonymous. With time, however, it developed a harder edge.

At one point, 4chan had been organizing raids on the notorious neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. But around 2010, Poole was reckoning with the fact that some of the boards on his website had essentially “become Stormfront,” as Dale Beran writes in _It Came From Something Awful._

In 2011, Poole created /pol/ explicitly to contain this growing far-right attitude, hoping it would spread no further. It didn’t work. “Rather, 4chan’s new neo-Nazi section thrived,” Beran writes.

Poole would keep trying, in vain, to stem the growing vitriol. In 2014, the anti-feminist Gamergate movement took hold on 4chan. Poole tried to ban all discussions of Gamergate, but the reactionary ethos of the movement seeped into the website just the same.

Soon after, Poole lost his stomach for the fight. In 2015 he sold the site to Hiroyuki Nishimura, a Japanese internet tycoon and founder of 2channel, on which 4chan is based. Nishimura, backed by millions of dollars in investment from Japanese toy company Good Smile, became the sole owner of 4chan. But his involvement has been largely hands-off. To help manage, moderate, and cultivate the imageboard, he enlisted the help of one of its most senior janitors: RapeApe.

The senior moderator, sometimes referred to as “GrapeApe,” has exercised an enormous influence on 4chan over the past decade. As one former moderator told Motherboard in 2020, “RapeApe has an agenda: He wants /pol/ to have an influence on the rest of the site and \[its\] politics.”

Documents turned over to New York investigators reveal that 4chan signed an agreement to pay RapeApe $3,000 a month for their services in 2015. By May 2022, that fee had risen to $4,400 a month. (RapeApe is one of very few 4chan staff who receive a salary.)

Tasked with compiling these records for the New York attorney general, Nishimura offered them some overtime. “Could you add $1000 with an invoice for next month?” Nishimura wrote to RapeApe in 2022. “New York Attorney General paper works takes so much \[of\] your time. Thank you so much for you work!”

After the Buffalo terrorist attack, one user posted a link to the Motherboard story to multiple sections of 4chan and laid the carnage at RapeApe’s feet. “I’ve been saying for years that rapeape’s /pol/tardation would result in severe consequences, and the mass shooting in Buffalo has proven me right,” they wrote. “Therefore, the only possible way to save this website is to have him doxxed, hunted down, and murdered.”

The user was banned for violating US law.

In the hour after Gendron’s attack, 4chan’s moderators congregated in a chat room.

“Apparently today's mass shooter makes 4chan responsible in his manifesto,” one janitor, Astria, wrote. “4chan being associated with such an atrocity is the last thing I wanted.” The moderators hoped it was fake. “You couldn’t do a better job at making 4chan look bad.” 

Another janitor, Troid, wondered why they should bother discussing the mass murder. “What's the point of even mentioning it? unless we plan to do something about it, which we don't.”

“Be easy on him troid, its his first 4chan mass shooter as a mod ;^),” wrote a third janitor, yournamehere.

Janitor Aeolian jumped in to insist it wasn’t their fault. “IMO this guy is an 8chan user, not really a 4chan user. I also think we do a really good job moderating potential threats. I don’t feel we’re lacking anywhere on the site in that regard.”

In his manifesto, however, Gendron credits 4chan with his radicalization. While he credits 8chan as well, Gendron heaps praise on /pol/ and /k/, the guns board, for showing him the “truth” and helping him maximize his chances of carnage.

“I got a lot of information from Plateland; a discord I found on 4chan’s /k/ board (love you guys),” Gendron wrote.

Troid wasn’t as quick to dismiss 4chan’s role. “There are in fact threads about the great replacement on /pol/,” they wrote. “Let's not pretend we don't know what the connection is and why people would question 4chan in this instance.”

The other janitors—whose display names in the chat do not necessarily correspond to their 4chan usernames—agreed. But in the ensuing hours and days, the conversation in the chat room drifted away from self-reflection. The moderators shifted blame onto other websites (“If he was on 4chan he wasn’t ‘from’ here.”), mocked federal agencies trying to investigate the litany of threats posted to the website (“We get tons of emails about each moron who makes one of those troll posts”), and lauded their own moderation efforts.

In the chat room, set up to help janitors discuss their moderation practices, a junior janitor asked if requesting or sharing the video of the massacre violated the rules. “It’s prolly fine,” replied CIAeolian, a more senior moderator. (It’s unclear from the documents whether Aeolian and CIAeolian are the same person.) The debate turned toward which channel was the best placed to host recordings of the livestream.

CIAeolian replied later with a clarification on 4chan’s first rule. Violating US law, they said, is “serious” and comes with “a long ban duration.” So it should be reserved for the most obvious violations, they added. ”E.g. ‘I’m going to commit a crime at date, time, place, location’ or ‘How do I acquire \[illegal thing\]?’” 

Nearly a week after the Buffalo terrorist attack, RapeApe and dsw—two moderators on 4chan’s payroll—had a conversation about the fallout. They had just received notice from their advertising platform, Bid.Glass, that 4chan was being dropped.

“We just got a termination notice from Bid.Glass. I'm going to try to talk him out of it (it's basically one dude running the company), but in the likely event that fails we are going to need some kind of replacement,” RapeApe wrote. They continued: “So far neither the FBI nor the local police have any evidence that the shooter posted on 4chan at all.” 

RapeApe lamented that 4chan was “getting the shaft” as other websites, like Reddit and Discord, were being let off “scot free.” 

Reddit, however, aggressively moderates communities known to be advocating racism and violence—and it has outright banned a litany of far-right and incel communities. In his diary, Gendron wrote, “Many subreddits I joined have been banned.” Discord, meanwhile, took a number of steps to improve moderation in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, including banning the community where Gendron got tactical advice and partnering with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. While it remains to be seen how effective those kinds of tactics are, Reddit and Discord can claim they are taking some action.

4chan, meanwhile, seems determined to change as little as possible, even if it could mean more acts of domestic terrorism carried out by its users.

“This will never change unfortunately,” dsw wrote. “Unless we do soemthing \[sic\] drastic like removing pol and all other random boards,” they wrote. RapeApe dismissed the suggestion less than 20 seconds later. “Even if we do none of these companies are going to accept us.”

“They might, if 4chan rebrands itself,” dsw replied. But RapeApe wasn’t swayed.

“That’s naive.”

Inside 4chan’s Top-Secret Moderation Machine

Plus: Amazon’s Ring was ordered to delete algorithms, North Korea’s failed spy satellite, and a rogue drone “attack” isn’t what it seems.

Code hidden inside PC motherboards left millions of machines vulnerable to malicious updates, researchers revealed this week. Staff at security firm Eclypsium found code within hundreds of models of motherboards created by Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte that allowed an updater program to download and run another piece of software. While the system was intended to keep the motherboard updated, the researchers found that the mechanism was implemented insecurely, potentially allowing attackers to hijack the backdoor and install malware.

Elsewhere, Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky revealed that its staff had been targeted by newly discovered zero-click malware impacting iPhones. Victims were sent a malicious message, including an attachment, on Apple’s iMessage. The attack automatically started exploiting multiple vulnerabilities to give the attackers access to devices, before the message deleted itself. Kaspersky says it believes the attack impacted more people than just its own staff. On the same day as Kaspersky revealed the iOS attack, Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, claimed thousands of Russians had been targeted by new iOS malware and accused the US National Security Agency (NSA) of conducting the attack. The Russian intelligence agency also claimed Apple had helped the NSA. The FSB did not publish technical details to support its claims, and Apple said it has never inserted a backdoor into its devices.

If that’s not enough encouragement to keep your devices updated, we’ve rounded up all the security patches issued in May. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all released important patches last month—go and make sure you're up to date.

And there’s more. Each week we round up the security stories we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Lina Khan, the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, warned this week that the agency is seeing criminals using artificial intelligence tools to “turbocharge” fraud and scams. The comments, which were made in New York and first reported by Bloomberg, cited examples of voice-cloning technology where AI was being used to trick people into thinking they were hearing a family member’s voice.

Recent machine-learning advances have made it possible for people’s voices to be imitated with only a few short clips of training data—although experts say AI-generated voice clips can vary widely in quality. In recent months, however, there has been a reported rise in the number of scam attempts apparently involving generated audio clips. Khan said that officials and lawmakers “need to be vigilant early” and that while new laws governing AI are being considered, existing laws still apply to many cases.

In a rare admission of failure, North Korean leaders said that the hermit nation’s attempt to put a spy satellite into orbit didn’t go as planned this week. They also said the country would attempt another launch in the future. On May 31, the Chollima-1 rocket, which was carrying the satellite, launched successfully, but its second stage failed to operate, causing the rocket to plunge into the sea. The launch triggered an emergency evacuation alert in South Korea, but this was later retracted by officials.

The satellite would have been North Korea’s first official spy satellite, which experts say would give it the ability to monitor the Korean Peninsula. The country has previously launched satellites, but experts believe they have not sent images back to North Korea. The failed launch comes at a time of high tensions on the peninsula, as North Korea continues to try to develop high-tech weapons and rockets. In response to the launch, South Korea announced new sanctions against the Kimsuky hacking group, which is linked to North Korea and is said to have stolen secret information linked to space development.

In recent years, Amazon has come under scrutiny for lax controls on people’s data. This week the US Federal Trade Commission, with the support of the Department of Justice, hit the tech giant with two settlements for a litany of failings concerning children’s data and its Ring smart home cameras.

In one instance, officials say, a former Ring employee spied on female customers in 2017—Amazon purchased Ring in 2018—viewing videos of them in their bedrooms and bathrooms. The FTC says Ring had given staff “dangerously overbroad access” to videos and had a “lax attitude toward privacy and security.” In a separate statement, the FTC said Amazon kept recordings of kids using its voice assistant Alexa and did not delete data when parents requested it.

The FTC ordered Amazon to pay around $30 million in response to the two settlements and introduce some new privacy measures. Perhaps more consequentially, the FTC said that Amazon should delete or destroy Ring recordings from before March 2018 as well as any “models or algorithms” that were developed from the data that was improperly collected. The order has to be approved by a judge before it is implemented. Amazon has said it disagrees with the FTC, and it denies “violating the law,” but it added that the “settlements put these matters behind us.”

As companies around the world race to build generative AI systems into their products, the cybersecurity industry is getting in on the action. This week OpenAI, the creator of text- and image-generating systems ChatGPT and Dall-E, opened a new program to work out how AI can best be used by cybersecurity professionals. The project is offering grants to those developing new systems.

OpenAI has proposed a number of potential projects, ranging from using machine learning to detect social engineering efforts and producing threat intelligence to inspecting source code for vulnerabilities and developing honeypots to trap hackers. While recent AI developments have been faster than many experts predicted, AI has been used in the cybersecurity industry for several years—although many claims don’t necessarily live up to the hype.

The US Air Force is moving quickly on testing artificial intelligence in flying machines—in January, it tested a tactical aircraft being flown by AI. However, this week, a new claim started circulating: that during a simulated test, a drone controlled by AI started to “attack” and “killed” a human operator overseeing it, because they were stopping it from accomplishing its objectives.

“The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat,” said Colnel Tucker Hamilton, according to a summary of an event at the Royal Aeronautical Society, in London. Hamilton continued to say that when the system was trained to not kill the operator, it started to target the communications tower the operator was using to communicate with the drone, stopping its messages from being sent.

However, the US Air Force says the simulation never took place. Spokesperson Ann Stefanek said the comments were “taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.” Hamilton has also clarified that he “misspoke” and he was talking about a “thought experiment.”

Despite this, the described scenario highlights the unintended ways that automated systems could bend rules imposed on them to achieve the goals they have been set to achieve. Called specification gaming by researchers, other instances have seen a simulated version of _Tetris_ pause the game to avoid losing, and an AI game character killed itself on level one to avoid dying on the next level.

AI Is Being Used to ‘Turbocharge’ Scams

Criminals may use artificial intelligence to scam you. Companies, like Google, are looking for ways AI and machine learning can help prevent phishing.

When Aparna Pappu, vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, spoke at Google I/O on May 10, she laid out a vision for artificial intelligence that helps users wade through their inbox. Pappu showed how generative AI can whisper summaries of long email threads in your ear, pull in relevant data from local files as you salsa together through unread messages, and dip you low to the ground as it suggests insertable text. Welcome to the inbox of the future. 

While the specifics of how it’ll arrive remain unclear, generative AI is poised to fundamentally alter how people communicate over email.  A broader subset of AI, called machine learning, already performs a kind of safety dance long after you've logged off. “Machine learning has been a critical part of what we’ve used to secure Gmail,” Pappu tells WIRED.

A few, errant clicks on a suspicious email can wreak havoc on your security, so how does machine learning help deflect phishing attacks? Neil Kumaran, a product lead at Google who focuses on security, explains that machine learning can look at the phrasing of incoming emails and compare it to past attacks. It can also flag unusual message patterns and sniff out any weirdness emanating from the metadata.

Machine learning can do more than just flag dangerous messages as they pop up. Kumaran points out that it also can be used to track the people responsible for phishing attacks. He says, “At the time of account creation, we do evaluations. We try to figure out, ‘Does it look like this account is going to be used for malicious purposes?’” In the event of a successful phishing attack on your Google account, AI is involved with the recovery process as well. The company uses machine learning to help decide which login attempts are legit.

“How do we extrapolate intelligence from user reports to identify attacks that we may not know about, or at least start to model the impact on our users?” asks Kumaran. The answer from Google, like the answer to many questions in 2023, is more AI. This instance of AI is not a flirty chatbot teasing you with long exchanges late into the night; it’s a burly bouncer kicking out the rabble-rousers with its algorithmic arms crossed.

On the reverse side, what’s instigating even more phishing attacks on your email inbox? I’ll give you one guess. First letter “A,” last letter “I.” For years, security experts have warned about the potential for AI-generated phishing attacks to overwhelm your inbox. “It’s very, very hard to detect AI with the naked eye, either through the dialect or through the URL,” says Patrick Harr, CEO of SlashNext, a messaging security company. Just like when people use AI-generated images and videos to create fairly convincing deepfakes, attackers may use AI-generated text to personalize phishing attempts in a way that’s difficult for users to detect.

Multiple companies focused on email security are working on models and using machine-learning techniques in an effort to further protect your inbox. “We take the corpus of data that’s coming in and do what’s called supervised learning,” says Hatem Naguib, CEO of Barracuda Networks, an IT security firm. In supervised learning, someone adds labels to a portion of the email data. Which messages are likely to be safe? Which ones are suspicious? This data is extrapolated to help a company flag phishing attacks with machine learning.

It's a valuable aspect of phishing detection, but attackers remain on the prowl for ways to circumvent protections. A persistent scam about a made-up Yeti Cooler giveaway evaded filters last year with an unexpected kind of HTML anchoring. 

Cybercriminals will remain intent on hacking your online accounts, especially your business email. Those who utilize generative AI may be able to better translate their phishing attacks into multiple languages, and chatbot-style applications can automate parts of the back-and-forth messages with potential victims.

Despite all of the possible phishing attacks enabled by AI, Aparna Pappu remains optimistic about the continued development of better, more refined security protections. “You’ve lowered the cost of what it takes to potentially lure someone,” she says. “But, on the flip side, we’ve built up greater detection capabilities as a result of these technologies.”

How AI Protects (and Attacks) Your Inbox

Newly announced sanctions against Iran-based Avaran Cloud underscore the complexity of crafting Washington’s internet freedom efforts.

The United States Treasury announced on Friday that it is sanctioning the Iranian technology company Arvan Cloud, along with two senior employees of the company and an affiliated firm based in the United Arab Emirates. Officials from both the Treasury and the US State Department said on Friday that the company has close ties to Iran’s Information and Communications Technology Ministry and plays a key role in providing infrastructure for the regime's surveillance activities and restrictive intranet known as the National Information Network (NIN).

US sanctions against Iran are extensive, and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued a number of sanctions specifically related to the Iranian government's long-standing attacks on internet freedom and digital access within the country. The full scope of US sanctions against Iran have already significantly isolated the country's economy, and its government's own internet shutdowns, digital blocking, and censorship have only further fueled financial hardship. But a US government official told WIRED on Friday that the Biden administration has seen consistent evidence that naming and shaming regime collaborators stifles an impacted company's ability to recruit top talent within the country.

“Today is a very bad day for anyone who has Arvan Cloud listed on their résumé,” said the official, who spoke to WIRED on the condition that they not be named. “We really do see Iran as an epicenter in the global struggle over the free flow of information. You’re at a tipping point between a bifurcated series of intranets and a global internet.”

The Iranian regime faced months of mass protests after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran's “morality police” in September while being held for allegedly violating rules about wearing hijab. Ever since, the government has continued to expand its NIN national intranet and tighten digital restrictions and censorship.

Many Iranians still maintain access to the global internet, though, through circumvention tools like VPNs and other relay technologies. The Biden administration has specifically invested in recent years to help private companies that create circumvention tools tailor them for Iran and keep them running. This fits into broader US investment. Since 2008, for example, the State Department has invested more than $320 million of congressionally directed funding toward global internet freedom programs, technology, and digital access research. The US Treasury also announced a special license in September, known as Iran General License D-2, that allows private companies to develop and offer digital services to Iranians without violating sanctions.

A senior government official, who also spoke on background, told WIRED that at some points since the regime escalated its internet disruptions in September, 30 million Iranians—nearly one in three—were using US-supported anti-censorship tools. And the official said that usage by millions or tens of millions of Iranians is still common currently.

Developing and maintaining circumvention tools is a cat-and-mouse game in Iran and in any country that restricts digital freedom because regimes are always looking for technological solutions to block loopholes. 

“We’ve seen that the regime has taken unprecedented steps to disrupt the internet and disrupt people’s access to the internet,” the senior official told WIRED. “Everyone has to assume that the regime is doing everything it can to crack down on these types of tools.”

Digital rights activists working outside the country to support Iran say the US government's support of circumvention tools has been valuable.

“It's certainly true that they are by far providing the highest amount of support for the main VPNs used in Iran,” says Reza Ghazinouri, a strategic adviser at United for Iran, a San Francisco–based human rights and civil liberties group.

But some have reservations about the strategies the US government has used to promote internet freedom in Iran. Amir Rashidi, director of internet security and digital rights at the Iran-focused human rights organization Miaan Group, says he has concerns about the sanctions against Arvan Cloud because he worries that cracking down on key digital services in Iran simply adds more restrictions.

“In any place, if you go after infrastructure, even if they're controlled by the government, sanctioning an electric company or a gas company, that's not going to help anyone,” Rashidi says. "If you sanction internet infrastructure, you're just making the Iranian government's job a lot easier.

Rashidi notes, too, that while he is not surprised that a company like Arvan has close ties to the Iranian regime, he wishes the US government would provide more detailed evidence for why it singled out this tech company to be sanctioned over any other in Iran. He points out that Arvan is seemingly the only Iranian tech company that publishes an annual transparency report of any sort—even if it is often not particularly illuminating. 

In July 2021, Arvan also publicly joined other Iranian tech companies and digital rights activists in opposing restrictive legislation the regime was promoting under the guise of a “user protection” bill. And on Tuesday, the company's CEO Pouya Pirhosseinloo, one of the executives named in the US Treasury sanctions on Friday, published an essay calling for expanded internet freedom within Iran.

Pirhosseinloo wrote that Iran should be focused on “removing filtering and extensive internet disruptions” as well as “removing any kind of disruptions and restrictions on internet protocols in the name of dealing with VPNs.” And he concluded by calling for a massive overhaul of Iran's approach to internet freedom.

“We should accept that Iran should be taken out of global isolation, sanctions, and hope should be restored to the body of Iranian society by removing internal sanctions,” Pirhosseinloo wrote. "Such a path will not begin until life is restored through the freedom of the Internet and the removal of its widespread disturbances and restrictions. Return to the roots of the digital economy."

Iran's digital landscape is complicated and efforts to influence the Iranian regime are never straightforward.

“I'm not saying these people are fantastic, but they were outspoken against the Iranian government's plans,” Rashidi says. “Maybe the US government has information I don't have, but I'd like to see more evidence to back up the claim.”

The Messy US Influence That’s Helping Iranians Stay Online

On the same day, Russia’s FSB intelligence service launched wild claims of NSA and Apple hacking thousands of Russians.

The Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has made headlines for years by exposing sophisticated hacking by Russian and Western state-sponsored cyberspies alike. Now it’s exposing a stealthy new intrusion campaign where Kaspersky itself was a target.

In a report published today, Kaspersky said that at the beginning of the year, it detected targeted attacks against a group of iPhones after analyzing the company’s own corporate network traffic. The campaign, which the researchers call Operation Triangulation and say is “ongoing,” appears to date back to 2019 and utilized multiple vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system to let attackers take control of victim devices.

Kaspersky says the attack chain utilized “zero-click” exploitation to compromise targets’ devices by simply sending a specially crafted message to victims over Apple’s iMessage service. Victims received the message, which included a malicious attachment, and exploitation would begin whether victims opened the message and inspected the attachment or not. Then the attack would chain together multiple vulnerabilities to give the hackers deeper and deeper access to the target’s device. And the final malware payload would automatically download to the victim’s device before the original malicious message and attachment self-deleted.

Kaspersky’s revelation of the new iOS hacking campaign comes on the same day that Russia’s FSB intelligence service separately announced a claim that the US National Security Agency has hacked thousands of Russians’ phones. Even more remarkably, the FSB claimed that Apple had participated in that broad hacking of iOS devices, willingly providing vulnerabilities to the NSA to exploit in its spying operations.

Apple said in a statement to WIRED, “We have never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any Apple product and never will.”

When asked about Kaspersky’s report, an Apple spokesperson noted that the findings only appear to pertain to iPhones running iOS version 15.7 and below. The current version of iOS is 16.5.

Kaspersky says that the malware it discovered cannot persist on a device once it is rebooted, but the researchers say they saw evidence of reinfection in some cases. The exact nature of the vulnerabilities used in the exploit chain remains unclear, though Kaspersky says that one of the flaws was likely the kernel extension vulnerability CVE-2022-46690 that Apple patched in December. 

Zero-click vulnerabilities can exist on any platform, but in recent years, attackers and spyware vendors have focused on finding these flaws in Apple’s iOS, often in iMessage, and exploiting them to launch targeted attacks on iPhones. This is partly because services like iMessage present unusually fertile ground within iOS for discovering vulnerabilities, but also because attacks on iOS devices with this approach are often very difficult for victims to detect.

“Kaspersky, arguably one of the best exploit detection companies in the world, was potentially hacked via an iOS zero-day for five years, and it was only discovered now,” says longtime macOS and iOS security researcher Patrick Wardle. “That shows how ridiculously hard it is to detect these exploits and attacks.”

In their report, the Kaspersky researchers point out that one of the reasons for this difficulty is iOS’s locked-down design, which makes it very tough to inspect the operating system’s activity.

“The security of iOS, once breached, makes it really challenging to detect these attacks,” says Wardle, who was formerly an NSA staffer. At the same time, he adds that attackers would need to assume any brazen campaign to target Kaspersky would eventually be discovered. “In my opinion, this would be sloppy for an NSA attack,” he says. “But it shows that either hacking Kaspersky was incredibly valuable for the attacker or that whoever this was likely has other iOS zero days as well. If you only have one exploit, you’re not going to risk your only iOS remote attack to hack Kaspersky.”

The NSA declined WIRED’s request for comment on either the FSB announcement or Kaspersky’s findings.

With the release of iOS 16 in September 2022, Apple introduced a special security setting for the mobile operating system known as Lockdown Mode that intentionally restricts usability and access to features that can be porous within services like iMessage and Apple’s WebKit. It is not known whether Lockdown Mode would have prevented the attacks Kaspersky observed.

The Russian government’s purported discovery of Apple’s collusion with US intelligence “testifies to the close cooperation of the American company Apple with the national intelligence community, in particular the US NSA, and confirms that the declared policy of ensuring the confidentiality of personal data of users of Apple devices is not true,” claims an FSB statement, which adds that it would allow the NSA and “partners in anti-Russian activities” to target “any person of interest to the White House,” as well as US citizens.

The FSB statement wasn’t accompanied by any technical details of the described NSA spy campaign, or any evidence that Apple colluded in it.

Apple has historically resisted pressure to provide a “backdoor” or other vulnerability to US law enforcement or intelligence agencies. That stance was demonstrated most publicly in Apple’s high-profile 2016 showdown with the FBI over the bureau’s demand that Apple assist in the decryption of an iPhone used by San Bernadino mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The standoff only ended when the FBI found its own method of accessing the iPhone’s storage with the help of Australian cybersecurity firm Azimuth.

Despite its announcement coming on the same day as the FSB’s claims, Kaspersky has so far made no claims that the Operation Triangulation hackers who targeted the company were working on behalf of the NSA. Nor has the cybersecurity firm attributed the hacking to the Equation Group, Kaspersky’s name for the state-sponsored hackers it has previously tied to highly sophisticated malware, including Stuxnet and Duqu, tools widely believed to have been created and deployed by the NSA and US allies.

Kaspersky did say in a statement to WIRED that, “Given the sophistication of the cyberespionage campaign and the complexity of analysis of the iOS platform, further research will surely reveal more details on the matter.”

US intelligence agencies and US allies would, of course, have plenty of reason to want to look over Kaspersky’s shoulder. Aside from years of warnings from the US government that Kaspersky has ties to the Russian government, the company’s researchers have long demonstrated their willingness to track and expose hacking campaigns conducted by Western governments that Western cybersecurity firms don’t. In 2015, in fact, Kaspersky revealed that its own network had been breached by hackers who used a variant of the Duqu malware, suggesting a link to the Equation Group—and thus potentially the NSA.

That history, combined with the sophistication of the malware that targeted Kaspersky, suggests that as wild as the FSB’s claims may be, there’s good reason to imagine that Kaspersky’s intruders could have ties to a government. But if you hack one of the world’s most prolific trackers of state-sponsored hackers—even with seamless, tough-to-detect iPhone malware—you can expect, sooner or later, to get caught.

Kaspersky Says New Zero-Day Malware Hit iPhones—Including Its Own

Plus: Microsoft patches two zero-day flaws, Google’s Android and Chrome get some much-needed updates, and more.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released major patches this month to fix multiple security flaws already being used in attacks. May was also a critical month for enterprise software, with GitLab, SAP, and Cisco releasing fixes for multiple bugs in their products.

Here’s everything you need to know about the security updates released in May.

Apple iOS and iPadOS 16.5

Apple has released its long-awaited point update iOS 16.5, addressing 39 issues, three of which are already being exploited in real-life attacks. The iOS upgrade patches vulnerabilities in the Kernel at the heart of the operating system and in WebKit, the engine that powers the Safari browser. The three already exploited flaws are among five fixed in WebKit—tracked as CVE-2023-32409, CVE-2023-28204, and CVE-2023-32373.

CVE-2023-32409 is an issue that could allow an attacker to break out of the Web Content sandbox remotely, reported by Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group and Donncha Ó Cearbhaill of Amnesty International’s Security Lab. CVE-2023-28204 is a flaw that risks a user disclosing sensitive information. Finally, CVE-2023-32373 is a use-after-free bug that could enable arbitrary code execution.

Earlier in the month, Apple released iOS 16.4.1 (a) and iPadOS 16.4.1 (a)—the iPhone maker’s first-ever Rapid Security Response update—fixing the latter two exploited WebKit vulnerabilities also patched in iOS 16.5.

Apple iOS and iPadOS 16.5 were issued alongside iOS 15.7.6 and iPadOS 15.7.6 for older iPhones, as well as iTunes 12.12.9 for Windows, Safari 16.5, macOS Big Sur 11.7.7, macOS Ventura 13.4, and macOS Monterey 12.6.6.

Apple also released its first security update for Beats and AirPods headphones.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s mid-month Patch Tuesday fixed 40 security issues, two of which were zero-day flaws already being used in attacks. The first zero-day vulnerability, CVE-2023-29336, is an elevation-of-privilege bug in the Win32k driver that could allow an attacker to gain System privileges.

The second serious flaw, CVE-2023-24932, is a Secure Boot security feature bypass issue that could allow a privileged attacker to execute code. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could bypass Secure Boot,” Microsoft said, adding that the flaw is difficult to exploit: “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to compromise admin credentials on the device.”

The security update is not a full fix: It addresses the vulnerability by updating the Windows Boot Manager, which could cause issues, the company warned. Additional steps are required at this time to mitigate the vulnerability, Microsoft said, pointing to steps affected users can take to mitigate the issue.

Google Android

Google has released its latest Android security patches, fixing 40 flaws, including an already exploited Kernel vulnerability. The updates also include fixes for issues in the Android Framework, System, Kernel, MediaTek, Unisoc, and Qualcomm components.

The most severe of these issues is a high-severity security vulnerability in the Framework component that could lead to local escalation of privilege, Google said, adding that user interaction is needed for exploitation.

Previously linked to commercial spyware vendors, CVE-2023-0266 is a Kernel issue that could lead to local escalation of privilege. User interaction is not needed for exploitation.

Source

Wired