Apple has released emergency security updates to address two new zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in attacks to compromise iPhones, Macs, and iPads.

* Mandiant tracked 55 zero-day vulnerabilities that we judge were exploited in 2022. Although this count is lower than the record-breaking 81 zero-days exploited in 2021, it still represents almost triple the number from 2020. * Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage groups exploited more zero-days than other cyber espionage actors in 2022, which is consistent with previous years. * We identified four zero-day vulnerabilities exploited by financially motivated threat actors. 75% of these instances appear to be linked to ransomware operations. * Products from Microsoft, Google, and Apple made up the majority of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2022, consistent with previous years. The most exploited product types were operating systems (OS) (19), followed by browsers (11), security, IT, and network management products (10), and mobile OS (6).

In late 2022 and early 2023, Project Zero reported eighteen 0-day vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems produced by Samsung Semiconductor. The four most severe of these eighteen vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-24033 and three other vulnerabilities that have yet to be assigned CVE-IDs) allowed for Internet-to-baseband remote code execution. Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number. With limited additional research and development, we believe that skilled attackers would be able to quickly create an operational exploit to compromise affected devices silently and remotely.

Microsoft today patched 80 different vulnerabilities. This includes the Chromium vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Edge. Nine vulnerabilities are rated as "Critical" by Microsoft. Three of the vulnerabilities, all rated "important", are already being exploited

During the fall of 2022, a few friends and I took a road trip from Chicago, IL to Washington, DC to attend a cybersecurity conference and (try) to take a break from our usual computer work. While we were visiting the University of Maryland, we came across a fleet of electric scooters scattered across the campus and couldn't resist poking at the scooter's mobile app. To our surprise, our actions caused the horns and headlights on all of the scooters to turn on and stay on for 15 minutes straight. When everything eventually settled down, we sent a report over to the scooter manufacturer and became super interested in trying to more ways to make more things honk. We brainstormed for a while, and then realized that nearly every automobile manufactured in the last 5 years had nearly identical functionality. If an attacker were able to find vulnerabilities in the API endpoints that vehicle telematics systems used, they could honk the horn, flash the lights, remotely track, lock/unlock, and start/stop vehicles, completely remotely.