TL;DR: A newly discovered iOS hacking technique can steal personal data from hundreds of millions of iPhones if users visit the wrong website. It’s one of two major iOS exploits to surface in weeks—and both may have been obtained through a growing exploit market where ready-made hacking tools are bought, deployed, and discarded like burner phones. (It’s also a reminder to update your devices.)

What happened: Right now, up to roughly 270 million devices still running certain versions of iOS 18 are one wrong website away from having everything on them stolen. Tap a news link on your commute, scroll an article in bed, open a URL from a group chat—if the site’s infected, the hack silently hijacks your device to grab passwords, photos, chat logs, browser history, and Apple Health data in minutes.

This hacking technique, called DarkSword, was discovered jointly by Google and cybersecurity firms iVerify and Lookout. It’s not spyware, which installs itself on your device and monitors you over time; DarkSword never installs anything. It uses your phone’s existing processes, grabs what it can, and disappears on reboot, leaving almost no trace.

According to Wired, this malicious code was found “embedded in components of otherwise legitimate Ukrainian websites, including online news outlets and a government agency site,” but it’s not clear how it got there. Google also found victims of it in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Malaysia. The silver lining: It only works on iOS. Visit the same page on a Mac, an Android, a Chromebook, or your Kindle, and nothing happens.

Everything’s for sale: Researchers told Wired it’s unlikely Russian hackers actually created DarkSword. The researchers suspect they bought it from an exploit broker—a middleman that buys and sells hacking tools. Another iOS exploit called Coruna surfaced just two weeks earlier; it appears to have been built by a US defense contractor (where a former employee was recently convicted of selling hacking tools to a Russian broker). The existence of such exploit brokers means that it’s no big deal if one tool gets exposed—hackers can just buy another. They’ve also made wide-scale iOS hacks easier overall—previously, attackers tended to pick specific high-profile targets rather than target people en masse.

Hacking tools aren’t the only personal-data product booming, either. Data brokers like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters collect your location and personal details from apps and public records, then sell them to government agencies like ICE and CBP—no warrant required. Just this week, the FBI admitted to buying people’s location data from third-party brokers again.

Bottom line: Update your iOS devices—Apple has already pushed emergency patches, including for older devices that can’t run iOS 26. You can also enable Lockdown Mode, a more extreme security measure which restricts many device features to block cybersecurity attacks. (The FBI reportedly couldn’t crack a Washington Post reporter’s iPhone earlier this year because she had it turned on.) Older iOS versions carry known, unpatched vulnerabilities that attackers specifically target—and apparently the black market selling such exploits is booming. —WK

Your inbox just launched a podcast

Inbox zero is a nice idea in theory, but in reality, a lot of us are just trying not to drown in unread messages. Sometimes my email count climbs so high that it starts to feel less like communication and more like a backlog of homework. If you’ve ever wished your inbox could simply read itself to you, Tech Brew reader Jess from Switzerland uses NotebookLM to make hers do just that.

The setup: Jess uses the AI research and note-taking assistant to create weekly “podcasts” of all the emails she doesn’t have time to read. She selects multiple emails at once, hits “print” to save them as a PDF, and then uploads it into NotebookLM so it can “generate its magic.” (You may have to do this for each email individually depending on what email service provider you use.) She then asks the tool to create a podcast-style audio conversation summarizing her emails, which she can play in the app or download for offline listening.

Why it works: “It has saved about 10 hours of reading time per week,” Jess estimates, adding that the hack helps her “stay current while walking the dog or commuting into the office.” Designed to analyze your uploaded documents, NotebookLM is good at synthesizing large volumes of information by creating audio, visual, or written summaries. Plus, you can ask it questions about your documents, and it will give you answers with citations to the original text.

Some caveats: Even though it’s grounded in the sources you give it, NotebookLM does have the potential to “hallucinate” by fabricating or misinterpreting info, though it’s apparently less likely to do this than many other AI models. It struggles with complex math and financial data, and each Notebook you create is limited to 50 sources—whether individual uploads or links. —CM

If you have a tech tip or life hack you just can’t live without, fill out this form and you may see it featured in a future edition.

How do you do, fellow kids? Meta wants more people to hang out on Facebook: It’s now offering to pay popular creators up to $3,000 a month to liven up the social network that first launched over two decades ago.

But before you strain yourself trying to remember the password you set in 2008 to post a photo album of a freshman year kegger, the new Creator Fast Track program comes with some fine print: It pays $1,000/month to those with at least 100,000 followers across TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, while the full $3,000 is only available to those with over a million. You have to post at least 15 Reels to Facebook within a 30-day period across 10 different days to be eligible for the bonus, which feels like the content creator equivalent of a court-ordered community service schedule. These payments also only last three months—after which Meta hopes Facebook’s (admittedly pretty lucrative) monetization programs will convince creators to stick around.

Facebook is still the largest social network on Earth by a comfortable margin, with over 3 billion monthly active users globally. But its most engaged users skew older—daily Facebook use peaks among 30- to 49-year-olds (58%) and 50- to 64-year-olds (54%), per Pew Research. 80% of those between 18 to 29 say they use Instagram, compared to just 68% of that group who use Facebook at all. Meta clearly wants younger blood, but Facebook in 2026 is seen as a place where your tech-challenged uncle replies to CNN articles as though Anderson Cooper is personally reading his comments—or where skilled negotiators demand you give them every item you list on Marketplace for free. Meta can pay creators to show up on Facebook—but changing the perception that it’s a social site for old people might take longer than three months. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5

• Walmart has obtained patents for algorithmic pricing tools—and they could affect everything from food to clothing and home goods.
• Altman has “so much gratitude” for the coders who are enabling AI to replace their jobs now, and the responses to his tweet are chef’s kiss.
• With a $1.25 billion investment from Uber, Rivian is getting into the robotaxi business—a giant technological leap from where it is now.
• Meta is shutting down Horizon Worlds on VR. Wait, actually, no, it’s not.
• DoorDash is now paying couriers to train AI and robotics models through “activities such as recording conversations or filming household chores.”