Surveillance | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Apple on Thursday sent a fresh batch of notifications to customers whom it suspects may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks. In a statement shared with TechCrunch, the iPhone maker said it alerted an unspecified number of users targeted in 110 countries and that it has notified customers in over 150 countries to date. Apple began sending threat notifications to users in late 2021. "The extreme cost, sophistication, and worldwide nature of mercenary spyware attacks make them some of the most advanced digital threats in existence today," the tech giant said . "As a result, Apple does not attribute the attacks or resulting threat notifications to any specific attackers or geographical regions." Typically, such notifications are sent to people who may have been individually targeted because of "who they are or what they do," including journalists, activists, politicians, and diplomats. They tend to focus on a very small number of speci...

At least one Russian intelligence service is systematically hijacking internet-connected security cameras across Europe and Ukraine, using the feeds to watch military transport routes, weapons shipments bound for Kyiv , and the locations of Ukrainian troops. That is the finding of a cybersecurity advisory published July 10 by the AIVD and MIVD, the Netherlands' civilian and military intelligence services, which describe the operation as ongoing. In Ukraine, the surveillance has not stayed passive. Camera access there has been "used in attempts to neutralise Ukrainian military personnel" and destroy their equipment, the services say, turning an exposed roadside or business camera into a targeting aid. Across EU and NATO states, the services add, the same camera access is also collecting military intelligence that has nothing to do with the war. Getting in is rarely the hard part. The operators scan the internet for exposed devices, fingerprint IP cameras by bran...

Meta has filed a patent application for an AI that listens to your voice throughout the day, works out how it thinks you are feeling from the way you sound, and keeps a timestamped log of every read. Each read gets pinned to the moment it happened: the time, your location, what you were doing, even how you were using your phone. Some versions in the filing would listen all day; others would check in only at set times. None of these ships in a product today, and Meta has not announced one; a filing like this stakes a claim on an idea long before anyone commits to building it. The application,  US 2026/0182881 , was filed by Meta Platforms in December 2025 and published on July 2. It names a single inventor, Lachlan Dunn , and traces back to a provisional filing from December 2024. The patent-analysis site  Patentlyze  flagged the filing first. Its title pairs two ideas, emotional state analysis and real-time fitness coaching. The claims show the first is the ...

Russian authorities used Cellebrite's UFED forensic tools to break into the iPhone of detained opposition activist Andrey Pivovarov in June 2021, three months after Cellebrite said it would stop selling its tools and services to Russia and Belarus. The finding, published  June 25 by the Citizen Lab , rests on two things that rarely line up: traces on the phone itself and an official Russian government report that names the tool. Investigators searched the extracted data for political contacts, opposition figures, and the names of activist organizations. This was not remote spyware. It was a forensic tool run on a seized device in custody, used to build a case in a political prosecution. Pivovarov ran Open Russia , an opposition group the Kremlin had branded "undesirable," a label that turned continued involvement into a criminal offense. He was  pulled off a flight  at St. Petersburg airport on May 31, 2021, and his iPhone 12 and MacBook were confiscated. He neve...