Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with the ninth episode of our short-form news show, 16 minutes, where we cover recent headlines, The A6 and Z way, why they're in the news from our vantage point in tech.

Sometimes we cover multiple items. Sometimes we go deep on just one or two topics. So this week we're doing one of our deep dives connected

to one huge topic, which is what the heck is going on with all the recent news around phone

fraud happening lately. But first, you can subscribe to 16 minutes separately wherever you like to

get your podcasts. And also reminder that after next week or so, we will no longer publish

16 minutes here along with the regular A6

and Z podcast, so be sure to go and subscribe to it separately if you still want the weekly

take on news and tech. As a reminder, none of this is investment advice or intended for investors.

Please be sure to see A6NZ.com slash disclosures for important information. Also, the show notes include links to the

articles cited or other relevant background. You can find those at a6.com slash 16 minutes. Thank you.

Okay, so let me quickly summarize the news and then I'll welcome our A6 and Z experts.

One, just this week, the FBI's Cyber Division released a note, headlined cybercriminals used social engineering

and technical attacks to circumvent multi-factor authentication. And this matters in this context,

because phones are frequently used for second-factor authentication. Two, the next piece of news,

is that just last week, a telecom security firm reported on a vulnerability called Sim Jacker that involves

SMS containing a spyware like code being sent to a mobile phone, which then instructs

the SIM card within the phone to take over, literally, that phone, in order to retrieve and

perform sensitive commands. And the key here is that it's platform agnostic, which means it works

across a wide range of mobile devices regardless of the hardware or software.

And then finally, another big piece of news is that Google's Project Zero Team, which is focused on finding zero day vulnerabilities and just to quickly define that.

Those are unintended flaws in a system, kind of like a tumor in the human body that hasn't been detected yet, that can be targeted and exploited by cybercriminals resulting in zero-day exploits or zero-day attacks. And that team released a

post titled a very deep dive into iOS exploit chains found in the wild, sharing that they had

...