To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Andy Greenberg Lily Hay NewmanAs the Israel-Hamas war escalated this week, WIRED looked at the conditions that contributed to Israel's intelligence failures ahead of Hamas' initial attack last Saturday, as well as the hacktivism and digital mayhem that has subsequently sprung up around the kinetic war. The situation has led to a torrent of misinformation across global discourse, particularly on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), where fake photos, old videos, and video game footage have exploded on an unprecedented scale. X’s Trust and Safety team claims it has been working to address the situation, but company CEO Elon Musk has been “posting through it,” sharing conspiracies and engaging with QAnon discourse on the platform. The chaotic situation on X has been difficult for the average user to keep up with. In one case, a graphic Hamas video that Donald Trump Jr. shared on the platform actually turned out to be legitimate, even though it seemed at first look like it might have been part of the broader deluge of misinformation. And beyond just X, rumors of a “Global Day of Jihad” on Friday unleashed a dangerous wave of disinformation across digital platforms—one that threatened to cross into real-world violence.With the trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in full swing this week, WIRED took a deep look at the day someone stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the ill-fated cryptocurrency exchange as it was declaring bankruptcy. And new evidence released by researchers this week indicates that the stolen FTX funds went through a chain of intermediaries that eventually led to Russia-linked money launderers.As chaos in the United States House of Representatives continues over Republicans' inability to deal with far-right hardliners and elect a new speaker, WIRED reported that Republican Party leaders have imposed cell phone bans in an attempt to keep backroom dealmaking under wraps. The United Nations' top internet governance body may host its next two annual meetings in countries known for repressive digital policies and abusive information control, which risks normalizing internet censorship. And white supremacist “active clubs” are gaining traction in part through communication on the messaging app Telegram.Meanwhile, Google announced this week that it will make the more secure password replacement known as passkeys the default login option for its personal account holders as part of the company's efforts to promote adoption of the technology. And a new internet protocol vulnerability known as “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset” impacts virtually every web server around the world and will take years to stamp out, exposing some sites and digital services to denial of service attacks long-term.And there's more. Each week we round up the security and privacy news that we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.Notorious high-end commercial spyware like Pegasus and Predator has been used over the past decade to target human rights activists, protesters, and journalists. But a foreign nation using it to target the smartphones of US members of Congress represents a rare and brazen new appearance of those notorious tools. On Monday The Washington Post, along with a consortium of more than a dozen international media outlets, revealed that the Vietnamese government used that Predator spyware, distributed by the surveillance firms Cytrox and Intellexa, to target at least four members of Congress—representative Michael McCaul and senators Chris Murphy, John Hoeven, and Gary Peters—as well as Asia-focused experts at US think tanks and several journalists that include CNN’s lead national security reporter, Jim Sciutto.In the hacking campaign, those individuals were targeted in replies on X (formerly known as Twitter) that included links to websites that would have infected their iOS or Android phones with the Predator spyware. That tactic appears to have been both reckless and unsuccessful: Anyone else who saw the tweets and clicked on the link would have been infected too, and the highly public nature of that infection attempt helped researchers and reporters to analyze the scope and targeting of the campaign. The attempted espionage was timed to US government meetings with Vietnamese officials, and it appears to have been aimed at understanding US intentions in the meeting, particularly related to relations with China.Amanda HooverDavid GilbertRamin SkibbaBoone AshworthThe media consortium, along with security researchers from Amnesty International and Google’s Threat Analysis Group, were able to show Vietnam’s connection to the Predator hacking campaign through documents they obtained that detail the Vietnamese government’s contract with Intellexa in 2020, and later an extension of the deal to allow the use of the Predator software. The internal documents went so far as to capture the response of Intellexa’s founder, Israeli former military hacker turned entrepreneur Tal Dilian, when the deal was announced: “Wooow!!!!” Vietnam’s government would later target French officials with Predator before this year’s campaign targeting US congressmen.Despite efforts by Israel and other nations to cut off funding to Hamas in recent years, the group raised millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency before the past weekend’s attack that killed more than a thousand Israelis. An analysis by The Wall Street Journal found that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah had collectively raised hundreds of millions in crypto over the past several years, with $41 million going to Hamas specifically. Given that the Journal learned of that funding in part through Israeli seizures of crypto accounts, however, it’s not clear how much of that money was frozen or seized versus how much might have actually been successfully laundered or liquidated by Hamas and other groups. In response to the weekend’s attacks, the Israeli government and the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, both announced that a new round of Hamas crypto accounts had been frozen. Though crypto has helped Hamas and other groups move funds across borders, its traceability on blockchains has presented a challenge for designated terrorist groups. In 2021, for instance, Hamas asked its supporters to stop making donations via cryptocurrency, due to the ease of tracking those transactions and unmasking contributors.Last year, Reuters reporters Chris Bing and Raphael Satter published an investigation into Aviram Azari, an Israeli private investigator who is accused of using mercenary hackers to gather intelligence on the critics of major corporations involved in lawsuits against them. Now, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, where Azari has been convicted on criminal charges, have filed a sentencing memo that notes that activists’ communications stolen by Azari’s hackers were later used by Exxon in the company’s attempts to head off investigations and lawsuits by state attorneys general. The memo still doesn’t name Exxon as Azari’s client, but it implicitly suggests a link between the company and Azari: Prosecutors point in their memo to leaks of climate activists’ private emails to media, which were later cited by Exxon in their responses to state attorney generals as evidence of underhanded tactics by activists as they tried to prove that Exxon knew and covered up the role of fossil fuels in climate change. A Massachusetts lawsuit against Exxon that resulted from the state’s investigation is ongoing.Internet giant Akamai warned this week that the infamous Magecart hacker crew, long focused on credit card fraud, has developed a clever new technique for spoofing credit card payment fields. The hackers managed to hide their malicious scripts in the 404 “page not found” error pages of ecommerce sites, then trigger those pages to load a spoofed payment field that impersonates a checkout page to steal credit card information. “The idea of manipulating the default 404 error page of a targeted website can offer Magecart actors various creative options for improved hiding and evasion,” warned Akamai researcher Roman Lvovsky. Akamai noted that the technique was used on the website of significant brands in the food and retail industries but declined to name them.📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletterScientists have an audacious plan to map the ancient world before it disappearsInside FTX’s all-night race to stop a $1 billion crypto heistThe rebel drone maker of MyanmarHow a zero-gravity Omega watch repair revolutionized NASA’s space station fixesAn epic fight over what really killed the dinosaurs🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binocularsDavid GilbertDavid GilbertDavid GilbertLily Hay NewmanLily Hay NewmanMatt LasloDavid GilbertAndy GreenbergMore From WIREDContact© 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. 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