Your Push Notifications Aren’t Safe From the FBI

Amid horrific threats from United States president Donald Trump as the US and Iran negotiated a ceasefire, the US government warned this week that Iran-linked hackers were carrying out attacks against US energy and water infrastructure targets. With nearly one in five people in Lebanon displaced by Israeli attacks, the government is attempting to manage the crisis without modern digital infrastructure and an emergency system that is barely hanging on. Plus, a WIRED analysis looked at Syrian government account hijacks in March and the inadequacies they expose in Syria’s baseline cybersecurity defenses.

Amid rising fears of political violence, a WIRED investigation found that US political candidates are spending more on security, including purchasing equipment like home alarms and bulletproof vests. And recent research looking at Telegram groups found that men are sharing thousands of nonconsensual images of women and girls, purchasing spyware to use against their wives and friends, and engaging in doxing and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, as governments scramble to address growing industrial scamming originating from Southeast Asia, China has emerged as the biggest enforcer, but also a selective one, resulting in crime syndicates shifting their focus abroad to avoid Chinese targets.

Anthropic formally announced its new Claude Mythos Preview model this week and said that for now it will only make the model available to a select group of a few dozen leading tech and financial organizations, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the Linux Foundation. The consortium, dubbed Project Glasswing, will explore Mythos Preview’s advanced hacking and other cybersecurity capabilities and assess the best ways to improve software and hardware defenses before capabilities like the ones in Mythos Preview proliferate more broadly across other models and inevitably end up in the hands of attackers. The announcements sparked controversy about whether Mythos Preview and similar capabilities will truly be as consequential for cybersecurity as Anthropic says. Experts told WIRED that while it may not be a dramatic catastrophe, it is important for defenders to come together and use their early access to make changes in how software is developed and how organizations around the world invest in patching.

Finally, a WIRED investigation found that nonprofit groups linked to Customs and Border Protection facilities were selling challenge coins that celebrated the Trump administration’s immigration raids, including one coin that depicted Charlotte’s Web characters in riot gear.

The FBI recently got its hands on copies of encrypted Signal messages being sent to a defendant's iPhone because the contents of those messages were included in push notifications. Even though Signal had been removed from the phone prior to it being seized by the FBI, the notifications still lived on in the phone's internal memory. The issue affects all apps that send push notifications, not just Signal.

Despite the tenuous ceasefire, tens of millions of ordinary Iranians are still without regular internet connectivity. The regime-imposed internet blackout is now reaching the 1,000 hour point. Meanwhile, the FBI’s annual internet crime report for 2025 showed losses topped $20 billion—an increase of 26 percent compared to 2024. More than half of these reported losses ($11.3 billion) were linked to cryptocurrency scams.

Google this week expanded Gmail’s end-to-end encryption to its Android and iOS apps, allowing enterprise users to compose and read E2EE messages natively on mobile for the first time. The feature is available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus customers.