Tech
Hack-for-hire group caught targeting Android devices and iCloud backups
Security researchers say they have identified a hack-for-hire group targeting journalists, activists, and government officials across the Middle East and North Africa. The hackers used phishing attacks to access targets’ iCloud backups and messaging accounts on Signal, and deployed Android spyware capable of taking over the targets’ devices.
This hacking campaign highlights a growing trend of government agencies outsourcing their hacking operations to private hack-for-hire companies. Some governments already rely on commercial companies that develop spyware and exploits used by police and intelligence agencies to access data on people’s phones.
Researchers from the digital rights organization Access Now documented three instances of attacks over 2023 through 2025 against two Egyptian journalists, and a journalist in Lebanon whose case was also documented by digital rights organization SMEX.
Mobile cybersecurity company Lookout also investigated these attacks. The three organizations collaborated with each other and published separate reports on Wednesday.
According to Lookout, the attacks go beyond members of Egyptian and Lebanese civil society, and include targets in the Bahraini and Egyptian governments, as well as targets in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and potentially the United States or alumni of American universities.
Lookout concluded that the hackers behind this espionage campaign work for a hack-for-hire vendor with connections to BITTER APT, a hacking group that cybersecurity companies suspect has ties to the Indian government.
Justin Albrecht, principal researcher at Lookout, told TechCrunch that the company behind the campaign may be an offshoot of the Indian hack-for-hire startup Appin, and noted one such company named RebSec as a possible suspect. In 2022 and 2023, Reuters published extensive investigations into Appin and other similar India-based companies, which exposed how these companies are allegedly hired to hack company executives, politicians, military officials, and others.
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Appin apparently later shut down, but Albrecht noted that the discovery of this new hacking campaign shows that the activity “didn’t disappear and they just moved onto smaller companies.”
These groups and their customers get “plausible deniability since they run all the operations and infrastructure.” And for their customers, these hack-for-hire groups are likely cheaper than purchasing commercial spyware, said Albrecht.
Rebsec could not be reached for comment, as the company has deleted its social media accounts and website.
Contact Us
Do you have more information about Rebsec Solutions? Or other hack-for-hire companies? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email.
Mohammed Al-Maskati, an investigator and director at Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline who worked on these cases, said that “these operations have become cheaper and it’s possible to evade responsibility, especially since we won’t know who the end customer is, and the infrastructure won’t reveal the entity behind it.”
While groups like BITTER may not have the most advanced hacking and spy tools, their tactics can still be highly effective.
In the attacks part of this campaign, the hackers used several different techniques. When targeting iPhone users, the hackers tried to trick targets into giving up their Apple ID credentials in order to then hack into their iCloud backups, which effectively would have given them access to the full content of the targets’ iPhones.
This is “potentially a cheaper alternative to the use of more sophisticated and expensive iOS spyware,” according to Access Now.
When targeting Android users, the hackers used a spyware called ProSpy, masquerading as popular messaging and communications apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Zoom, as well as ToTok and Botim, two apps that are popular in the Middle East.
In some cases, the hackers tried to trick victims into registering and adding a new device — controlled by the hackers — to their Signal account, a technique that has been popular among various hacking groups, including Russian spies.
A spokesperson for the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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