Tech News Weekly 429: DarkSword Puts Hundreds of Millions at Risk

Coming up on Tech News, weekly Jennifer Patterson,

Tuy of the Verge joins us,

and we kick off the show by talking about a Kia

trying to bring smart home devices to the masses,

but struggling to do so afterwards.

I talk about DLSS5, the Yassified filter

for games from Nvidia, and Andy Greenberg of Wired stops

by to give us an understanding of Dark Sword,

a tool that can be used to hack hundreds

of millions of iPhones, before I round things out

with an update on Knitz's investigation

into full self-driving vehicles.

All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

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This is Twit.

This is Tech News Weekly, episode 429

with Jennifer Patterson, Tui, and me, Michael Sargent.

Recorded Thursday, March 19th, 2026,

Darksword puts hundreds of millions at risk.

Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly,

the show where every week we talk to

and about the people making and breaking the tech news.

I am your host, Micah Sargent,

and this week I am joined by the wonderful,

Jennifer Patterson, Tui.

Welcome back, Jen.

Hello, I've just been here.

I was on Twitter last Sunday, so it feels like

Twit week for me, it's very exciting.

We always appreciate it when you're here

and I know our listeners adore you as well.

So thank you for being here so frequently.

Now, if you have not tuned into the show before,

what are you doing?

No, I'm glad you're here.

This is the part of the show where we talk

about our stories of the week,

these stories that we find interesting

and want to share with all of you.

And in some cases, these are stories

that have been written by our lovely guest,

as is the case today.

Jennifer, go ahead and introduce us.

Yeah, so I wrote a story this week.

That's not really totally newsy,

but it's sort of a follow-up on something

that I've been covering for a while

and it may be affecting you if you are a smart home user.

My beat is very much around the smart home

and a big thing happened later this year,

which was IKEA released a whole bunch

of new smart home products using the

relatively new matter over thread protocol.

This was a big news in the smart home

because they're very inexpensive,

as is IKEA's MO,

so you can get things like smart bulbs,

smart remotes, motion sensors,

starting around $6.

I remember when I first bought a motion sensor

like 10 years ago and it cost me like $50.

Yeah.

So this is a huge shift and great for the smart home,

but there have been some issues.

And this is what I was covering this week

is the rollout of these new products,

which are now fairly widely available in the US

from the smart bulbs just sort of launched last week

and the sensors and the buttons arrived a few weeks ago.

There have been a lot of reports of people struggling

to connect these devices to their smart home.

I should point out that there are also lots of people

that have had no problems whatsoever,

but a very large number of people have struggled

myself included.

So I've been sort of digging into what these issues are

because the broader picture here is this is the first big rollout

of matter over thread.

And we've talked about matter on the show before.

It's a new-ish, it's like four years old now,

but in the realm of protocols,

relatively new, standard for the smart home.

And it represents an opportunity of bringing

all the smart home players together

to create an interoperable system

because if you've spent much time in the smart home

in the last decade, it's been very fragmented,

walled gardens, ecosystems that you have to commit to.

And the whole point of matter is to make it open

and interoperable.

And IKEA's jumping on to this,

and they've actually been involved with matter since the beginning,

but now this is their first rollout of products

that support matter is a huge moment, really,

for the smart home.

And unfortunately, these problems are somewhat indicative

of the problems that matter have had as a whole.

And in the article that I wrote this week,

I was sort of just discussing,

I was looking at some of the challenges

these people have been facing, connecting these devices,

and trying to understand what some of those problems are.

And IKEA has acknowledged that people

have been having problems.

The thread group, which is the group

that helps develop the thread protocol that matter uses,

also commented for me on my article,

explaining that one of the problems people are running into

is when I say people like the manufacturers

and the developers who are building these products,

is that everyone has to work together.

So what they actually said is,

thread provides a robust and secure foundation,

but optimizing the end-to-end experience

requires ongoing collaboration across all these components.

And this is the heart of the problem here.

Interoperability is hard.

And where really, I think people are struggling

to find ways to get their devices connected

because everyone has very, very different setups.

This was what matter was supposed to solve.

And sadly, we doesn't feel like it has yet.

There's a lot of work.

It seems like going on to try and fix this problem.

And IKEA has stepped up and introduced a whole host

of new troubleshooting tools and such

that I write about in my article.

And if you're having these problems, I recommend you check them out.

But there was one particularly poignant report recently

that really sort of made me think, OK,

we have to dive into this properly.

It was a great piece by a YouTuber called A Smarter Home.

And he went through every single problem he had heard

or seen people have with these devices

and tried to find solutions.

And the video's like 45 minutes long

and he found so many problems came up with some solutions.

But this is not making the smart home simpler.

This is making the smart home harder.

So yeah, it's like good news and bad news all at once.

Have you tried any of these devices, Micra?

Not from IKEA.

So it's interesting you bring this up,

specifically the matter aspect of it, right?

Because I recently tried...

So I've had some relative success

with matter devices that are plugged in.

So I've maybe connected three or four

different matter devices that have constant power

and have not had an issue with those.

My theory there is that part of it is

because those are sort of higher capability matter devices

that are sort of up the chain

and are capable of more communication and et cetera, et cetera.

What I have struggled with, specifically,

I got an Acara door and window sensor.

And for the life of me could not get it to...

And I know all the tricks,

I were many of the tricks at least

and tried so many different ways,

ways that they're not going to have

in the owner's manual, yeah, exactly.

And nothing was working,

which was very frustrating to get it to work.

And so I ended up just having to pivot to a...

Basically purchased a ring door sensor

that would typically go on a door that is for your,

you know, entering and leaving your home

and put that where I needed it inside the home.

Because I just wanted, you know,

one little instance of this notification happening.

And so, yeah, that was a little frustrating

and it was the first time that I sort of

since the new way of things,

where matter is supposed to be sort of,

it's figured out folks or it's mostly figured out

where I said, okay, maybe it's not figured out.

So, yeah, I haven't had it with Akeia,

but certainly have experienced similar issues

when it came to this.

I'm also curious and perhaps you'll talk about,

like, I assume given your branding, smart home mama,

that you hear from folks all the time.

So this smarter home, I think you said...

Smart-a-half person. Sorry, I said it wrong.

But great name.

Yeah, absolutely great name.

Has experienced, you know, people talking about this

have you as well?

Yeah, so I started to see a lot of chatter

right after the devices were released

on the Trad-free Reddit forum.

And Trad-free was the name of Akeia's

previous smart home incarnation, which is based on Zigbee.

So this move to thread was a big one.

It was a complete rearchitecture for the platform

and for Akeia.

And, you know, I should make it clear here that this...

Well, this is a problem that Akeia is experiencing.

It's amplified because Akeia is such a big brand

and well-known and so many people

have obviously gone out and bought these.

Not as many people go out and buy a carer

of motion sensors is my guess than Akeia motion sensors,

you know, it's a much simpler product to get.

It's a mass market product,

whereas most smart home products aren't there yet.

One of the...

So the point that I'm trying to make is that

these problems aren't just Akeias.

This is a problem for the standard as a whole.

And it's a problem I've been writing about

since the standard launched and they keep saying,

you know, we're fixing it, we're fixing it.

One of the issues, I think, is that so many...

There are so many different platforms,

like that quote I read from the thread group.

There are so many different pieces and parts

that need to interact to make everything work.

And, like, Apple, Google, Amazon,

they're all on different versions of matter.

Products that you buy are all on different versions of matter.

They're on different versions of thread.

And, like, so getting everything to sort of mesh,

because that's the point of thread.

It's a mesh network is causing a lot of problems.

Now, this is probably down to the fact

that this is still a relatively new protocol and a standard.

So I said, what is it, four years?

I think 2022 is when it launched.

So, you know, in the scheme of things, that's new.

If you think about when Bluetooth and Wi-Fi first came out,

it took a long time for things to just work.

But it's just, yeah, it's frustrating for users

to have these complicated, you know,

these frustrating setup processes

and no obvious way to fix it.

I mean, and my favorite thing when I was going

through all this testing was I,

this is the instruction manual that comes with

the Bill Razer remote.

Oh, wow.

It's like, okay, so my remote didn't work.

Now, what do I do?

Follow these little stickmen on the Facebook

that came in the box.

And it's like, I can understand

why people have been getting frustrated.

You know, IQ is, it's the joke, isn't it?

That the IQ manuals are like, yeah.

Indicipherable, try putting wireless connectivity

along with an IQ manual

and you can get a recipe for tearing your hair out.

So it's, yeah, it's been,

it's been an interesting thing to follow

the last couple of months.

From what I understand, talking to sort of people

in the industry, there is a lot of work

going on behind the scenes to try and fix this.

I'm hoping to have an update on that next week

to follow up to this article.

But yeah, it's, as someone who's covered this space

for a long time, this was very exciting.

Really, you know, a real sea change for the smart home.

And so far, it's been very frustrating

and that's disappointing.

I mean, I'm glad for the people

that have had good experiences here

that shows that this can work.

But it needs to be as the title of my article implies,

this needs to be good for everyone.

This can't just be, you know, hit or miss.

We can't roll out this kind of,

these kind of products and promise this

great, seamless, interoperable experience.

And it only works for like 60% of people.

Absolutely.

I mean, I agree wholeheartedly

because that puts people off

and they don't want to try it again

and be disappointed by it.

And it puts forth a narrative

that, you know, smart home stuff is too complicated

and doesn't work and that's,

and I think that one of the quickest ways

I see people get frustrated with technology is

when they feel, because I think that

there's even some patients that people will still maintain

when something isn't working.

It's specifically when they feel

they cannot fix it themselves

that things go from, you know, not 0 to 100,

but like 40 to 100 real quick.

And so that is frustrating this idea

that, okay, you are not going to be able

to fix this yourself and good luck

and then you have to go online and find something

and then half the time the stuff that you find

doesn't always solve the problem.

And then you're stuck with this.

And there's so much out there.

It's like, do turn off IPv6

or turn on IPv6 on your router.

Do a dance, turn off this one,

spin around five times and flick the button.

It's like, ah, yes.

This should not be the solution.

And I, you know, one of the conclusions I draw

for my opinion for all of this

is that one of the biggest problems here

is the platform support.

Platforms being Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa,

home assistant, I mean, home assistant

is the most progressive in all of this,

but even, you know, it's hard to keep everything straight.

And I think right now Apple,

the big platforms, Samsung Smart Things, Apple Home,

Google Home, they just haven't really committed enough

to this.

I think maybe the engineers, the people that are deeply involved

have, but whether the companies are really pushing this

forward as a whole, still I still remain skeptical

that that's happening.

And that's why we're stalling.

And this is why standards need momentum

in order to become, you know, whatever,

to become a standard, to become the standard

of the smart home.

And that momentum just feels like it's falling away.

And it could be tied on Apple side to its slow rollout

of its new Siri.

I feel like that is causing a lot of knock-on delays.

I mean, we just saw reported this week

that the head of Apple Home hardware has left

and gone to Ura, the ring, the ring people.

Is that my saying that right?

Ura.

I would pronounce it Ura, but it's funny.

A wife got another British individual who also says Ura.

So maybe it's just the annex and things.

So yeah, it's still interoperability is still a dream.

But I think things like this will hopefully, you know,

light a fire under some of these platforms

because it's such a big high-profile product launch

that has been going not very smoothly

and that a few people kind of have egg on their face here.

So we'll see.

I will be following this closely.

And if you want more, I've written a few articles

about this already, and I will be writing more.

So keep following my work at the verge.

And you can, and let me know if you've

been having great experiences or difficult experiences

with these products or any thread or matter products.

Because this is something I'm really interested in sort

of getting a deeper into and understanding

what these issues are, even if they're going

to stop making me turn my hair out.

Well, while we give Jen a moment to brush the hair she has left,

let's take a quick break here.

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All right, we are back from the break joined

by Jennifer Patisantui of The Verge,

who is drinking out of her Duff Cup.

I just realized I had this, and I just grabbed it

from my cupboard without thinking,

I got, it was my son's birthday present.

Isn't it fun?

That is a wonderful cup.

May or may not be,

haven't a beer right now.

So I wanted to talk about something

that we covered earlier, the NVIDIA GTC conference,

during that event NVIDIA showed off a tool, DLSS-5.

It calls it the most significant breakthrough

in computer graphics since real-time ray tracing,

which of course was released back in 2018,

and the internet immediately roasted it.

DLSS-5, the next generation of the company's

deep learning upscaling technology,

moves beyond sharpening resolution

and filling in frames to something a little more ambitious,

and unfortunately, or fortunately,

depending on your take, far more controversial.

It uses generative AI to completely overhaul lighting,

textures, and materials in real-time,

and the results have gamers, developers,

and artists recoiling.

As Kyle Orland reports for our technical

and Andrew Webster writes in The Verge,

what NVIDIA pitched as photo-real lighting and materials,

landed more like an unwanted Instagram filter

slapped on top of beloved game characters,

turning them into what one comments are described as,

quote,

yassified looks maxed freaks.

So let's-

But a lot of comments, they all do.

I love it, I love it.

So let's talk about what DLSS-5 actually does,

why the backlash has been so swift,

and what it might mean for the future of how games look.

So I think it's important to understand,

this is like the con, when I heard people talking about this,

this is the context that I think is a little bit important.

Previous versions of DLSS,

which actually stands for deep learning supersampling,

just worked on upscaling lower resolution frames,

or generating entirely new ones,

it would help kind of smooth out performance,

but this fifth version goes further.

Jensen Wong called it a real-time neural rendering model,

and one that can deliver a new level of photo-real computer

graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects.

So the company says that the technology melds

generative AI with what they call hallucinated rendering

for this leap in realism, as they see it,

and will at the same time, the company very much asserts,

preserve the control artists need for creative expression.

Now, the existing generative video models,

and you sort of- and video talks about how it's difficult

to control them, and you don't get a predictability,

and so with DLSS-5, the company really focused on this

to make sure that it uses a game's internal color

and motion vectors as kind of anchors,

and will output to this 3D content.

So what does that mean?

It means that it's a little bit more anchored in reality,

and is not as focused on that hallucination part

to make it so that things feel like they're still part of the game.

It's supposed to help the system kind of differentiate

as well between characters, and then the hair,

and the fabric, and skin,

and then also environmental lighting conditions,

but-

I've seen all of these in the discord.

Yeah, but the discord of it is a crackery up.

Here's the other catch though.

Apparently, the current demo that we've seen requires

two RTX 5090 GPUs,

and one of those GPUs is entirely dedicated

to running DLSS-5.

Oh my gosh.

So yeah, it requires quite a bit.

John, can we please show the discord?

Because someone has DLSS-5 to Leo,

and that is cracking me up.

Oh my goodness.

If you are not watching and listening,

you gotta join the club,

because you gotta see these hilarious.

It was actually Anthony who shared it.

But anyway, DLSS-5 is getting lots of, oh no,

is getting lots of complaints for, as they say,

yassifying people now.

I first, I don't, I'm just curious, Jen,

are you or anyone close to you?

I just want to imagine you playing Call of Duty.

It's just being really good at Call of Duty.

It just would be so fun to me.

But tell me, is anyone, are you or anyone else gamers?

My son is a big gamer.

In fact, I should have kept him.

He was here a second ago.

I should have put him on the show.

He's a big, he's a big, oh, Grand Theft Auto.

Oh, okay, yeah.

That's his, his jive, Jam, and my daughter is two,

but not she doesn't do the scary ones.

I don't let her.

She really wants to, but he's doing the fortnight thing now.

She's kind of hit that age.

Yeah.

But, you know, the filter thing is the interest for me.

I mean, it is the sort of uncanny valley here of what we're seen.

And having watched video games change so drastically from my youth.

I was a big gamer, as in, I played a lot of Mario,

very different type of gaming.

Okay, we're equal, yeah.

Then we are both those kinds of gamers, I absolutely.

And I did computer gaming too.

Like, some, like, I loved games when computer games when I was a kid.

But, you know, this was in the, I'm talking like in the 80s,

when it was like little eight-bit things going on.

And I, I walk in on my son playing Grand Theft Auto.

I'm like, are you in a movie?

Right, it's so photorealistic.

It's like crazy.

And actually, he's been doing flight simulator

because he's trying to be a pilot.

I mean, he may as well, it's as good as flying a plane.

It's like insane how much video games have progressed and become so realistic.

But it's almost like you're kind of losing the game

when it becomes like real life.

Like, the game part of it, you went into this world.

It was an, it's an experiential and it's not real.

And this sort of shift towards realism.

And like, I should feel like I'm actually in the real world

rather than playing a video game.

I'm not a fan of.

I think, you know, that's not, I'm not a gamer.

So I cannot speak authoritatively here.

But my personal opinion here is I want games to feel like games.

I want movies to feel like movies.

I want the real world to feel like the real world.

I don't think that the three should meet.

I don't like this uncanny valueization of video games.

Especially as, and I see this with today's youth,

being online, being terminally online

is so, has become such a big issue.

People live their lives online.

And when it feels like the real world,

it becomes even easier to block out the real world.

Yes, yes, that's maybe getting a little philosophical here.

No, but I think it's important.

I do.

That is absolutely a part of it.

I think that, you know, when I've seen the reactions to this,

so I've tried to take in the different observations

and understandings of this.

And I did see somebody who was talking

about this experience and saying that people

are really focused on the faces.

And Nvidia's people, I mean, what would you expect?

But for them to have reasons why people should calm down

and be OK with it.

But I thought they made a very good point

in saying that, you know, for the longest time,

environments, particularly lighting, has come a long way.

And so there's been so much focus on the environment

getting this ultra realistic look.

And it's just now switched to focusing on faces.

And given people's reaction any time their phones get updated

to a new look or feel, it's not surprising

that people would be more apt to have negative thoughts

about this simply because it is new.

As opposed to it being that the faces are,

the face rendering is bad or gross or this or that,

could it be they argue?

They ask that simply what's happening here

is you're seeing something different in your brain

because of the way that we are goes, that's new, that's different.

And so I don't like it by default

because it's giving me these bad feelings of anxiety

because it's new.

So I get that point.

Somebody said that honestly, it's a mistake

to focus on the faces.

When they were looking at a scene,

they said that it was much more amazing

to look at the background and see how a table scene,

a table setting before was sort of flat and one-dimensional

within this 3D space.

But because of this rendering,

it made every individual object feel like the person had taken time

to almost write a story for every single piece

or item that's on the table.

And I think that that part is cool to me

in this idea of if the artist is able

to focus on what the artist is really good at

and the parts that would otherwise just be a,

well, we just gotta let it be standard,

that that could be improved by this system,

that's kind of a cool idea to me.

And so I'm not fully 100% anti,

but it's also true that I'm not a big gamer, right?

Like I don't do a lot of gaming and my partner is

and he had quite a few thoughts about this.

It doesn't help that one of the,

I think this is another aspect of it too,

is that people identify with their favorite games

and their sort of favorite franchises

and a lot of people, big fans of Resident Evil.

So for NVIDIA to show these Resident Evil characters

sort of redone with the Yassified filter,

that was particularly upsetting for people who said,

now Grace is, who's a character,

doesn't look anything like Grace.

And so yeah, I guess I'm of two minds in the sense that

I almost like the earlier versions of DLSS

where it was specifically focused on

hardware that maybe couldn't do all of the magic

being able to do more magic by way of a post processing filter

versus before where maybe this game was an A

or this console wasn't able to render something like this.

There's always going to be,

and I think reasonably so, complaints around the AI Slop,

around stealing people's creations around people's

the thing that's where this is coming from a lot, isn't it?

People are really, like there's just a backlash

against AI in general, in every field.

And I think, yeah, in the comments I've seen,

some people are like, why, what's the problem?

This is great, but others are like,

oh, this is, you know, the slippery slope,

and is it all going to be what happens to the creatives?

And yeah, there's an instinctive sort of negative reaction

to changes like this.

And I don't know that that is going to be a while,

there's an it until people actually see this.

This isn't sort of like happening tomorrow.

Right, I mean, if it requires those two cards,

and one of them completely devoted to rendering this,

then yeah, I mean, you're not going to get a PlayStation

that has the necessary hardware to pull this off right now.

And I think more than that,

you're not going to see game development studios doing this

right now because it's just not feasible or possible.

And I think that in and of itself,

the company said that this technology won't be ready

until the fall.

But I think ready versus sort of deployed.

Yeah, deployed in industry ready are two different things,

for sure.

Yeah, no, it's going to be interesting to follow.

I mean, we have a great reporter.

I mean, Andrew is a great gaming reporter,

but Jess Weatherbed is a reporter

on the verge who's been following sort of the impact

of AI on creators and creative industries.

And she has some great reporting on all across the board

about backlash to AI in the creative world.

There's always this balance, isn't there?

Like, how much benefit are we getting?

How much value is this giving the user versus what you are

potentially losing?

And I think changing the creativity,

or changing the characteristics of a fictional character

in a game has far less concern and implications

than, you know, the deep fake videos

that we're seeing, like actually using real people.

So, you know, I feel like this is definitely

a very niche concern and a niche focus.

Yeah, that's a good point.

But I do think it's one that is a very passionate

niche, gamers and gamers.

Gaming and gamers are, you know, very passionate

about their craft.

So I can see why this is upsetting people

with its potential, even though it's not actually deployed yet.

And so we'll see whether this tends any of those smaller

gaming companies off of trying to start implementing any

of this type of technology, even if they can.

I mean, it's hard enough right now, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's a lot more in these, I pull from two pieces,

Ars Technica and The Verge.

The Verge is Andrew Webster and Ars Technica's

Kyle Orland, as I mentioned.

So go check those out to learn more about DLSS5

and the blowback there in.

Jennifer Patterson, too, I thank you so very much

for being here today.

It's always a pleasure to get to chat with you

and learn about cool new things going on in your life.

If people would like to stay up to date with the work

that you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Just most of my work you can find on theverge.com,

forward slash authors, forward slash Jennifer Patterson,

too, you can see all my articles.

And I have a new episode of version history podcast

that will be coming out in a couple of weeks,

which is one of our, one of the Verge's new podcasts.

And it's a deep dive on the origins of the echo and Alexa.

Say, if you're interested in that,

be sure to subscribe to version history podcast

and follow me on the socials at smart home number.

Awesome, thank you so much for your time.

We appreciate it.

Thanks, bye.

Bye, bye.

Alrighty folks, we're gonna take another break

before we come back with an interview.

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All right, we are back from the break

and as I promised, here's an interview

I recorded earlier this morning.

A powerful new iPhone hacking technique

called Darksort has been found in the wild

and it's not just a threat to high-profile targets,

it could affect hundreds of millions of devices.

Discovered by researchers at Google and more,

Darksort has already been tied to campaigns and surveillance.

It works simply by luring a phone to an infected website.

Here to break it all down for us is Wired's Andy Greenberg.

Welcome to the show, Andy.

Glad to be here.

Yeah, pleasure to have you join us.

Now, I've got a few questions for you

and I was hoping that we could kind of kick things off

for folks who may not be familiar

with how iPhone hacking has traditionally worked.

I was kind of curious, could you please walk us through

what made these kinds of exploits so rare in the past

and then what's changed now with the discovery of Darksort?

Well, I mean, to put it simply,

hacking an iPhone is still very difficult.

The iPhone has great defenses.

It also has very restrictive rules

about what you can install.

I mean, if you're not jail-breaking your phone

then you can only install apps from Apple's App Store

and that makes it very difficult

to get a piece of malware onto an iPhone

or really to hack it in any way.

I mean, what we've seen really in recent years

until now is that iPhone hacking

is kind of extremely rare and very, very targeted phenomenon

where the victims are usually people

like opposition politicians or activists

or journalists or human rights defenders

in usually in countries with, you know,

dictatorial authoritarian regimes

that target those kinds of high-risk users

and the victims are very limited

to these few individuals because those regimes

don't want to burn their techniques essentially.

They don't want those very rare and expensive

iPhone hacking techniques to be discovered

and which would result in, you know,

those hacking techniques being patched by Apple

and also the hacking campaign itself being exposed.

So, you know, these are, you know,

we even like talked about kind of iPhone hacking

as almost like it was like a rare unicorn in recent years

and that's, you know, kind of backed up by the fact

that maybe the most famous iPhone hacking exploit

is known as Pegasus, you know, created by an SO group

that's kind of hacker for higher firm.

And I think that's all changing

with these couple of recent iPhone hacking incidents

that I think we'll get into.

Yeah, so dark sword doesn't require.

This is interesting.

A user to click a link or download anything

which I think makes it something

we've got to be paying attention to apparently.

You just have to visit an infected website.

Can you tell us a little bit about how that works technically?

And then I think more importantly,

if you're not sort of taking initiative there,

what kind of data is actually able to be stolen

from the device in this instance?

Right, well, as I was saying,

what makes this whole incident so different

from what we've seen in recent years

is that this was what's known as a watering hole attack

where the hacking technique is planted in a website

and if you simply visit that website

then your phone is compromised.

So the hackers are choosing a website

where they're essentially attacking everybody

who goes to that watering hole

as we call it in cyber security.

So that means that this technique is what people call

a one click exploit meaning that you can't simply

choose a target and hack their phone

without any interaction from them.

They have to visit a website.

But once they do, their phone is silently

and completely taken over.

And I can't promise to say that I can truly explain

how this hacking technique works.

It is absolutely incredible the level

of technical sophistication that's necessary

to fully take over an iPhone.

But Google has said that Darksword,

this particular exploit contains six different vulnerabilities

and that allowed it to exploit WebKit,

the basis of iOS browsers that then break out of the sandbox

that is meant to contain the security of the browser

and prevents any kind of intrusion technique

from breaking out of the browser

and getting into data on the rest of the phone.

Then it has to do a kind of privileged escalation

to get kind of like beyond user access

to essentially what we would call

in the kind of Windows operating system admin access

like access to the full phone.

And then it does, yeah, it does exfiltrate

essentially every kind of data you can imagine

from the phone.

It grabs photos, browser history,

passwords, calendar data, notes data,

it even takes like Apple health data from the phone.

And maybe the most interesting thing is that it,

or strange I was gonna say is that it also steals

cryptocurrency credentials to be able to

drain crypto wallets that might be stored on the phone.

So everything else about this looks like kind of typical

espionage and in fact Google has tied this to

what they say is a Russian state sponsored espionage actor

group.

But that cryptocurrency theft part of it is weird.

And it seems like maybe it is a sign

that these Russian spies were also moonlighting

as cybercriminals, which is certainly not unheard of.

It's something we have seen in the past as well.

Now another thing that I think really stuck out to me,

one of the most alarming details is that this code

apparently was just accessible, well documented.

Can you tell us kind of what do we understand

about the hackers behind this and kind of if people

are suddenly becoming aware of the exploit market,

what would you tell them about what they need to kind of

be mindful of and understand is going on out there?

Well, that is in fact probably the most disturbing thing

about the dark sword exploit is how,

sloppily it was used by these Russian hackers

who deployed it, it was embedded on Ukrainian websites.

Clearly, Russians target Ukrainians almost obsessively.

Like this is the Ukrainians are the number one hacking

target of any Russians by agency.

So that's not surprising.

But they put it on these Ukrainian websites

including a government website and news websites

in a form where it could so easily be grabbed

by any hacker and reused.

It was fully not obfuscated, you could read all of the code,

you could even read the comments from the developer of dark sword

explaining how to use different pieces of it.

So that makes it really all too easy for another hacker group

to simply pull down this exploit if they can find it

on one of these websites and start reusing it themselves

so to infects to target any victims that they choose.

And then there's apparently a connection here

between one hacking toolkit and another.

So I think you can kind of talk a little bit about that

that was discovered.

What do we understand about the origins of dark sword

and perhaps the origins of this latest round

of hacking toolkits?

Right, so this kind of whole news cycle began

with the discovery of a different iOS iPhone hacking technique.

Called Corruna.

So earlier this month, Google and I verified

the cyber security company focused on smartphones

revealed this iPhone hacking toolkit,

actually a whole collection of iPhone hacking techniques

called Corruna, which was even more sophisticated

than dark sword and was being used again

on these Ukrainian websites in a similar web-based attack.

But what was interesting about Corruna in part is that

despite it being used by Russians,

it was written by English language developers

and it shared similarities,

shared pieces of features essentially

with this thing called triangulation,

an older iPhone hacking technique that was discovered

in 2023 and attributed by the Russian government

to the US government.

So and then subsequently just last week,

TechCrunch reported that in fact, Corruna was created

by this US contractor called Trentions,

part of this larger contractor for him, L3 Harris.

So it appears that Corruna was actually created

for the US government and leaked to foreign adversaries.

In this case, Russian spies.

It was then used by for-profit cyber criminals

who were targeting Chinese crypto users

to steal their cryptocurrency.

So that is actually the beginning of this story.

Then just this week, I verified Google,

look out another cyber security firm found

that the same Russian hackers were also using dark sword.

So that's really how dark sword has come to light.

It's because of the scrutiny around this one Russian spy group

that was using this other hacking technique called Corruna

that was a US origin technique.

I mean, this is a very rare and troubling phenomenon

when a sophisticated hacking technique

is created for the US government to carry out surveillance

and then leaks and is used by foreign adversaries

and cyber criminals.

It kind of calls into question,

like whether it's safe for our tax dollars

to be used to create hacking techniques

that are then used against innocent victims by rogue actors.

Now, this, I think, is an interesting aspect

of the system as well.

You talk about this being this fileless approach.

That's a term that it's sort of the writing is there on the tin.

But can you tell us a little bit about why this matters

in terms of detection?

And then what does this mean for someone whose phone

has actually been compromised?

Right, well, and Corruna of the two of these techniques

was definitely more sophisticated,

but dark sword is interesting in that it is,

as you said, a kind of fileless technique,

meaning it doesn't leave behind a kind of spyware payload

on the phone that can be easily found

and analyzed afterwards.

It uses the phone's own processes to grab this data.

And it doesn't actually implant a piece of malware

an application on the phone that does all of this dirty work

of stealing the data.

So that means that it actually doesn't persist on the phone.

If you restart your phone, it's gone,

which is actually maybe an important thing

to note for potential victims.

Like if you are worried about a dark sword infection

on your phone, simply restart it.

In fact, a lot of iOS malware does not

have that persistence to survive or reboot.

But what it does do essentially is what the CEO of Iverify

Rocket Cole described to me as a kind of smashing grab attack,

where it just steals all the data in the first few minutes,

exfiltrates it to some hackers server, and the data is gone.

And that's certainly damaging enough.

And then I should say despite this kind of smashing grab

description, this is also very stealthy.

File this malware does not leave behind a lot of artifacts

that can be easily used to detect a dark sword intrusion.

So that's really what's troubling about this

is that it's quite difficult to know

if you have been victimized if you don't know exactly where

to look.

I mean, I verify and look out both say that their apps

are capable of finding a dark sword intrusion.

But if that's probably based on very specific clues

and tells of this use of that hacking technique,

and I would imagine that with a few tweaks,

somebody else could repurpose this same iOS exploit

and use it in a way that would be undetectable.

Yes.

And one of the things that kind of stuck out to me

is that we still have a significant number of iPhone owners

running iOS 18.

Do you have anything to say about maybe what's driving

the gap here and how it sort of factors into the risk

given that those exploits exist on what

is now an older operating system?

Right.

I mean, I should say really clearly here

that if you have updated your phone to iOS 26,

dark sword does not affect that your phone.

It works on iOS 18.

Corrino works on older versions of iOS 13 through 17.

So these are not like what we would call zero day exploits.

But it was kind of surprising to me as I heard about this,

just how many iPhones out there remain on iOS 18 in particular.

It's really almost like a could be as many as a quarter

of all iPhones.

And that seems to be, I'm not like an Apple Nerd

who obsessively tracks adoption rates of every operating

system version, but it does seem like the adoption

of iOS 26 has been slower than usual

because people actually hate this liquid glass interface

and other iOS changes that I don't have very strong feelings

about, but for whatever reason,

people have remained on iOS 18.

And that's very dangerous in this case.

You now have to choose it seems, and this

is the response from many people reading my article about this

between essentially what people kind of think

are like these crappy new iOS features

that they don't like, I guess because they're sort of slow

and overly animated, or the threat of Russian spyware.

So that is not like a happy decision to have to make.

But I do think that people need to update their iPhones.

I think that this is a serious hacking technique

that more than maybe any that I remember ever hearing about

is likely to proliferate and to be used

against Western victims, not just Ukrainians.

In fact, I should say Darksword has been used

against Ukrainians, Turkish people, Saudi Arabians,

Malaysians already by various hacker groups

according to Google.

And given how easily reusable it is,

it seems like it's only a matter of time

until it starts to hit us in the United States,

in the West, for any kind of espionage or for-profit hacking,

just given how easy it is to repurpose this

for whatever mode of hackers may have.

Lastly, I would love to know,

given that we're now seeing these kinds of exploits

deployed indiscriminately rather than against

these carefully chosen targets,

what do you think that shift means for the average iPhone user

who might have said, you know what?

I don't need to really worry about this.

This isn't an issue for me.

Well, you know, I verify and look out, you know,

being mobile cybersecurity companies would say

that it means that you need to think of your iPhone

as something you need to actively protect.

I'm, you know, I still, I hesitate to tell people,

you have to run anti-virus on your phone

the way you do on a Windows machine.

I think that's, I think we're on the cusp of that,

perhaps like I do myself use these apps on my phone.

I'm a journalist who worries about, you know,

these more targeted attacks.

It may be that we're on the kind of horizon

of a world where everybody has the worry

in the same way.

I think most importantly, and this is what Apple wanted

to stress is that you need to keep your phone updated,

you know, like enable auto updates of iOS.

Even if you don't like liquid glass,

I think it's worth it to keep your phone protected.

And Apple is not doing a bad job of that.

They patched these attacks as soon as they found out about them.

They've even pushed outpatches for like older versions

of their devices that can't run little

latest operating systems.

So they're taking this seriously,

but users do have to enable those updates.

So, you know, I would say from a user perspective,

that's one, you know, it's important to update your phone.

I would say that actually it's Apple,

maybe who really also need to change their mentality

about this.

I mean, Apple just kind of rhetorically saying

that, you know, iPhones are so well defended

that the only attacks we've ever seen against them

are extremely targeted against just a few individuals.

They say this publicly after most instances

of iOS malware.

And that does not seem to be the case anymore.

They need to actually help raise the awareness

that normal people are also getting hit by these attacks.

These extremely indiscriminate attacks.

If you so much has visited the wrong website,

then you would have had your phone hacked

in all of these cases.

So, you know, that's a new reality

and Apple needs to acknowledge it.

Absolutely.

Well, Andy, I want to thank you so much for taking the time

to join us today.

I think this is an incredibly important story

and I'm glad that you were able to be here

to tell us about it.

If people would like to follow you online

and check out the work that you're doing,

where are the places they should go to do so?

You can follow me on Blue Sky.

I'm A Greenberg on Blue Sky and of course on wired.com

and we also have a YouTube series

that I host these days called Hack Lab

that you can subscribe to on YouTube.

Awesome, I'm looking forward to checking that out.

Thank you again for your time

and hopefully we'll see you again soon.

Thank you, Micah.

All right, thanks so much to Andy

for joining us earlier today.

We will head into my final story of the week

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look forward to seeing you in the club.

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Club.

Back from the break and I just wanted to mention,

there's some stuff going on in the self-driving car world.

Nitsa is continuing to monitor the situation as it were.

The push toward hands-free driving

is frankly running up against some turbulence.

A series of reports from the Wall Street Journal

written by Ryan Felton, Ben Glickman,

and Don Niko Forbes paints a troubling picture

of where automated driving technology stands right now.

Internal documents from Ford reveal the company

new drivers were confused by its blue cruise system

well before launching it.

And Tesla's full self-driving system

is under an escalating federal investigation

after crashes in poor visibility conditions.

And just today, Nitsa expanded that Tesla probe

to cover 3.2 million vehicles,

upgrading it to an, quote, engineering analysis,

a step that could lead to a recall.

These stories together raise a fundamental question.

Are automakers moving faster than the technology

and the drivers using it can safely handle?

Let's start with the blue cruise problem

because people I think when they hear about full self-driving

or self-driving at all,

they immediately think of Tesla, right?

Well, other cars are doing this too.

And the sort of US darling that is Ford is also part of this.

Ryan Felton's deep investigation,

which was published earlier this month,

or excuse me earlier this year in February,

reveals that Ford actually had extensive internal evidence

that drivers misunderstood

how hands-free driving systems work,

even years before its blue cruise launched.

In June of 2018, Ford conducted a benchmarking study

and used GM's super cruise system for this.

More than 40 people drove a Cadillac CT6 on a Michigan highway

and the results confirmed the company's own concerns

that drivers worry they will be too complacent

behind the wheel with the system active.

The numbers of this 40 people,

so what can you really say about a study of 40,

were stark one in four drivers incorrectly believed

that super cruise would reposition the car

if it veered out of a lane.

So again, they incorrectly believed

that using super cruise would mean

that the car would be repositioned in the lane

if it veered out of the lane.

80% of drivers failed to notice

the initial flashing green light warning them to resume control.

And then a follow-up study of Ford's own developing system

in 2019 found that more than half,

60% of drivers incorrectly believed

the technology would steer the vehicle back into its lane

if it drifted.

So people don't know what self-driving can and can't do.

It's still not clear to the driver,

they are responsible for steering the vehicle back

into the lane.

That's what the presentation said.

Then there were some fatal crashes

leading to a federal inquiry.

Ford launched Blue Cruise in 2021,

despite knowing that this was an issue

and the consequences have been severe

in September of that year in 2021.

Barry Wooten was killed in Georgia

after losing control of his F-150,

his family said that he was in self-driving mode.

His daughter, Wendy Wells,

that her father was a lifelong car enthusiast.

And so he, of course,

wanted the latest in the greatest.

In 2024, two more deadly incidents

then drew federal attention.

In February, a Ford Mustang Mach E

using Blue Cruise struck a stopped Honda CR-V

on a San Antonio highway.

It did kill the Honda driver.

Ford told Nitzah that warnings to take control

of the wheel were ignored for 30 seconds before the collision.

And then weeks later, another Mach E

that was also using Blue Cruise

in a Pennsylvania construction zone,

slammed into a stopped Hyundai Elantra,

pushing it into a Toyota Prius,

both drivers of those vehicles died at the scene.

Arguably, this becomes a conversation,

not of just people understanding self-driving vehicles,

but also the deadliness of these gigantic trucks

that we have on our highways.

But I don't think people want to hear about that.

So I'm not going to get into it.

Ford maintains that neither accident was caused

by its system.

The company says these incidents,

unfortunately, illustrate that driving,

whether by humans alone or with technology,

require adequate time, adequate, no, adequate time

to perceive, classify, confirm, and react to events.

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So let's talk about what Ford told Nitsa.

Ford says, hey, Nitsa.

Blue Cruz's adaptive cruise control was designed

to stop decelerating and response to stationary objects

when traveling at or above 62 miles per hour.

So this is a feature that's supposed

to avoid what's called phantom braking,

where the system incorrectly reacts to bridges, overhead

signs, or other objects are actually in the roadway.

So other safety features like automatic emergency braking

are functional at higher speeds, but the design choice

means the system may not slow down for a stop

to vehicle in a travel lane at highway speeds.

So to be clear, if the speed of the vehicle

is above 62 miles per hour, Blue Cruz's adaptive cruise

control does not decelerate upon discovering

a stationary object in front of it.

So when you're driving even faster

and there's a stationary object, it won't slow down.

And the idea is that too many times it

was detecting a bridge or some other item in front of it

that then caused it to slow down.

Nitsa's administrator, Jonathan Morrison,

said in a January conference, we want

to be crystal clear that the systems available in today's

vehicles are driver assistance systems.

You're driving.

And I think that that's important.

Yeah, that needs to continue to be the conversation.

Now Ford, of course, is dealing with the Blue Cruz

scrutiny, but Tesla faces its own escalating federal

investigation in October of 2024.

Ben Glickman and once again, Don Niko Forbes reported

that Nitsa opened a preliminary evaluation

into Tesla's full self-driving system

after identifying four crashes involving the technology,

one in which a Tesla fatally struck a pedestrian.

The crashes occurred in these reduced visibility conditions

due to sun glare, fog, airborne dust.

And the agency started looking to see if the system could even

respond whenever it's in those scenarios

because those scenarios are going to come up a lot.

That investigation covers an estimated 2.4 million vehicles.

All Tesla models are going to be equipped

with the optional driver assistance software,

including certain versions of Model 3, Y, X, and S,

as well as the Cybertruck.

Now, that is one part of it.

The probe came just a week after Tesla's Robotaxi event

where the company outlined its plans to become a robotics

and AI-focused business.

Elon Musk said Tesla would offer its driverless taxi service

only where permitted, but gave no details

on navigating regulatory hurdles.

Now, as of today, March 19th, 2026,

that probe is expanded due to the escalation

of the investigation to an engineering analysis.

That means that recalls could result.

The scope, again, to now 3.2 million vehicles,

this has to do with several crashes,

including a fatal one where self-driving,

full self-driving, failed to alert drivers appropriately

about reduced visibility conditions.

So it needed to say, I can't tell what's going on

due to these changes, I almost started to sound like Christopher

walking, but anyway, I can't tell what's going on

with the stuff that's happening outside.

And so I need you to take control of the wheel.

I think, of course, for walking was telling me

to do that, perhaps I'd pay more attention.

Tesla, you should be listening to this.

Anyway, if this is seen to be enough of a problem,

then that does mean that we could be looking

at a huge recall.

And this has to do in part with Tesla's choice

to go with these vision-based setups.

No radar, no lidar.

We still don't really understand Tesla's true thinking here

on switching away from radar and lidar

and only going with vision-based systems,

but yeah, not a good idea.

Automakers are marketing increasingly sophisticated

driver assistance systems.

Despite the fact that internal research

and let's be real, real world crashes,

show that drivers fundamentally misunderstand

what these systems can and can't do.

So federal regulators are having to respond.

Ramping up scrutiny, unfortunately,

automakers continue to push this technology forward.

Ford is working toward eyes off highway driving by 2028.

And of course, Tesla has claimed full self-driving

for a while, but is also working

towards fully driverless robotaxies

that don't even have steering wheels or brake pedals.

The gap between what's being promised

and what's been proven and is the actual situation

continues to widen.

So to those of you out there with vehicles like this,

please be mindful, be aware,

and don't think of these systems as something

that can completely take over driving for you

because they just simply are not that.

Thank you all for tuning in to this week's episode

of Tech News Weekly.

The show publishes every Thursday,

Twitter.tv slash T, and W that is where you can go

to subscribe if you're not to the audio

and video versions of the show.

We'd love to have you join us

tell other people about the show as well.

If you would like to get all of our shows

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If you'd like to follow me online,

I'm at Michael Sargent on many of social media network

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That's CHI Hua Hua.coffee where I've got links

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Be sure to check out my other shows

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Thanks so very much for being here.

We'll catch you again soon

on a future episode of Tech News Weekly.

Bye-bye.

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