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Tech News Roundup: Microsoft Office Patch Exploited, FBI Faces Apple Lockdown, and More
A critical Microsoft Office vulnerability was rapidly exploited by Russian-state hackers, while the FBI encountered roadblocks accessing data from a journalist's iPhone protected by Apple's Lockdown Mode. Separately, a judge indicated that Donald Trump has not intervened in the SEC lawsuit against Elon Musk, and Notepad++ users may have been targeted by Chinese hackers. Meanwhile, Mistral AI launched a new open-source speech model.
Russian-state hackers, identified as APT28, Fancy Bear, Sednit, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy, wasted little time exploiting a Microsoft Office vulnerability (CVE-2026-21509) after Microsoft released an urgent security update late last month, according to Ars Technica. Researchers reported that the group compromised devices within diplomatic, maritime, and transport organizations in more than half a dozen countries less than 48 hours after the patch was released. The hackers reverse-engineered the patch and developed an advanced exploit that installed previously unseen backdoors.
In another security matter, the FBI has been unable to access data from a Washington Post reporter's iPhone seized during a January 14 search at her Virginia home, Ars Technica reported. The phone was protected by Apple's Lockdown Mode. According to a court filing, FBI agents were able to access the reporter's work laptop by having her use the fingerprint reader. The search warrant was executed as part of an investigation into a Pentagon contractor accused of illegally leaking classified information.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has not received any intervention from Donald Trump regarding a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit related to his 2022 Twitter takeover, Ars Technica stated. A US district judge made this observation this week. The SEC lawsuit, filed in the final days of the Biden administration, seeks $150 million in disgorgement, plus interest, civil penalties, and an injunction blocking Musk from future wrongdoing. The complaint alleges that Musk quietly acquired a 9 percent stake in Twitter without making timely disclosures, allowing him to acquire over 70 million shares at an artificially low price.
Notepad++ users may have been victims of a hacking campaign attributed to Chinese state-sponsored actors, Wired reported. Developers stated that the infrastructure delivering updates for Notepad++, a widely used text editor for Windows, was compromised for six months. The attackers allegedly used their control to deliver backdoored versions of the app to select targets. "I deeply apologize to all users affected by this hijacking," wrote the author of a post on the official notepad-plus-plus.org site. The attack reportedly began last June, with malicious actors intercepting and redirecting update traffic to malicious update servers.
In other tech news, Mistral AI, a Paris-based startup, released Voxtral Transcribe 2, a pair of open-source speech-to-text models, VentureBeat reported. The company claims these models can transcribe audio faster, more accurately, and more cheaply than existing solutions, all while running on a smartphone or laptop. Mistral AI positions itself as Europe's answer to OpenAI. The new models are designed to process sensitive audio without transmitting it to remote servers. The company says this is a feature that enterprise customers see as essential for everything from automated customer service to real-time translation.
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