Security News This Week: The FBI Still Hasn’t Cracked NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ Phone

Pig butchering, the crypto-based scammer scourge that has pulled in an estimated $75 billion from victims globally, is spreading beyond its roots in Southeast Asia, with operations proliferating across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

The UK’s National Crime Agency disclosed new details about the identities of the Russian ransomware group known as Evil Corp—as well as the group’s ties to Russian intelligence agencies and even its direct participation in espionage operations targeting NATO allies.

A WIRED investigation revealed how car-mounted automatic license plate reader cameras are capturing far more than just license plates, including campaign yard signs, bumper stickers, and other politically sensitive text, all examples of how a system for tracking vehicles threatens to become a broader surveillance tool.

In other news, ICE signed a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions, a known vendor of spyware including the hacking tool Graphite. And the Pentagon is increasingly adopting handheld controllers for weapons systems in an effort provide more intuitive interfaces to soldiers who have grown up playing Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

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

As the politics of America’s biggest city have been turned upside down by the criminal charges against New York mayor Eric Adams, there’s still a “significant wild card” in the corruption case against him, prosecutors said in court this week: The FBI can’t manage to get into his phone.

Prosecutors in the case against Adams, which centers on alleged illegal payments the mayor received from the Turkish government, revealed that the FBI still hasn’t cracked the encryption on Adams’ personal phone, nearly a year after it was seized. That phone is one of three that the bureau has taken from Adams, but agents seized Adams’ personal phone a day later than the other two devices he used in an official capacity. By that time, Adams had not only changed the passcode on the phone from a four digit PIN to six digits—a measure he says he took to prevent staffers from intentionally or unintentionally deleting information from the device. He also claims he immediately “forgot” that code to unlock it.

That very convenient amnesia may leave the FBI and prosecutors in a situation similar to their investigation into the San Bernardino mass shooting carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook in 2016, when the US government demanded Apple help unlock the shooter’s encrypted iPhone, leading to a high-profile standoff between the Apple and the FBI. In that case, the cybersecurity firm Azimuth eventually used a closely guarded—and expensive—hacking technique to unlock the device. In Adams’ case, prosecutors hinted that the FBI may have to resort to similar measures. “Decryption always catches up with encryption,” a prosecutor in the case, Hagan Scotten, told the judge.

Face recognition is one of only a few technologies that even Facebook and Google have hesitated to integrate into products like Google Glass and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses—and rightly so, given the privacy implications of a device that would allow anyone to look at a stranger on the street and immediately determine their phone number and home address. Now, however, a group of Harvard students has shown how easy it is to bolt that face recognition onto Meta’s augmented-reality eyewear. The project, known as I-XRAY, integrates with the face-recognition service Pimeyes to let Ray-Ban Meta wearers learn the name of virtually anyone they see and then immediately scour databases of personal information to determine other info about them, including names of family members, phone numbers, and home addresses. The students say they’re not releasing the code for their experiment, instead intending it as a demonstration of the privacy-invasive potential of augmented-reality devices. Point made.

If that warning about the privacy risks of AR eyewear needed more reinforcement, Meta this week also conceded to TechCrunch that it will use input from users’ smart glasses to train its AI products. Initially, Meta declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions about whether and how it would collect information from Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses for use as AI training data, in contrast to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that explicitly say they don’t exploit user inputs to train their AI services. A couple of days later, however, Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it does in fact use images or video collected through its smart glasses to train its AI, but only if the user submits them to Meta’s AI tools. That means anything that a user sees and asks Meta’s AI chatbot to comment on or analyze will become part of Meta’s massive AI-training data trove.

If you can’t arrest Russian hackers, at least you can nab their web domains. That, at least, is the approach this week of the US Justice Department, which along with Microsoft and the NGO Information Sharing and Analysis Center used a lawsuit to take control of more than a hundred web domains that had been used by Russian hackers working for the Kremlin’s intelligence and law enforcement agency known as the FSB. Those domains had been exploited in phishing campaigns by the Russian hacker group known as Star Blizzard, which has a history of targeting the typical victims of geopolitical spying such as journalists, think tanks, and NGOs. The domain seizures seem designed in part to head off threats of foreign interference in next month’s US election. “Rebuilding infrastructure takes time, absorbs resources, and costs money,” Steven Masada, the assistant general counsel of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said in a statement. “Today’s action impacts [the hackers’] operations at a critical point in time when foreign interference in US democratic processes is of utmost concern.”