Daily Briefing for 04.27.26

Top stories.

1. US Supreme Court weighs legality of geofence warrants.
2. Researchers analyze a cyber sabotage framework that predates Stuxnet.
3. Toronto police arrest three men accused of operating an SMS blaster.

US Supreme Court weighs legality of geofence warrants.

The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments today concerning the constitutionality of geofence warrants, a law enforcement technique that allows police to query tech companies' databases to identify mobile phones that were near the scene of a crime, NPR reports. The Supreme Court is weighing this technique against the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. Supporters argue that users who have opted in to location services have willingly reduced their expectations of privacy. Critics maintain that the technique amounts to a digital dragnet, allowing police to search across millions of accounts without individualized suspicion.

The case in question involves a 2019 bank robbery in Virginia, in which the thief was seen talking on his cellphone. After two months with no leads, police obtained a warrant to search Google's location data from the area around the bank on the day of the robbery. Google identified nineteen individuals, but disclosed only three of their names to the police. One of these individuals was the thief, who has since pleaded guilty.

Researchers analyze a cyber sabotage framework that predates Stuxnet.

SentinelOne has published a report on a newly discovered cyber sabotage framework that dates back to 2005, designed to produce inaccurate engineering and research results when deployed within an industrial facility. The malware, dubbed "fast16," "selectively targets high-precision calculation software, patching code in memory to tamper with results." The researchers note that the term "fast16" was referenced in the ShadowBrokers' leak of the US National Security Agency's "Territorial Dispute" components. The malware may have been crafted as part of an early effort to disrupt Iran's nuclear program.

SentinelOne notes, "Our best clues about the intended victims come from matching these patterns against large, era-appropriate software corpora. The strongest overlaps point to three high-precision engineering and simulation suites from the mid-2000s: LS-DYNA 970, PKPM, and the MOHID hydrodynamic modeling platform, all used for scenarios like crash testing, structural analysis, and environmental modeling. LS-DYNA in particular has been cited in public reporting on Iran’s suspected violations of Section T of the JCPOA, in studies of computer modeling relevant to nuclear weapons development."

Toronto police arrest three men accused of operating an SMS blaster.

Canadian police have arrested three men accused of operating an SMS blaster in Toronto, the Record reports. An SMS blaster is a device that imitates a legitimate cell tower in order to send phishing messages to nearby phones. Authorities said this is the first known instance of such a device being used in Canada. Detective Sergeant Lindsay Riddell of the Toronto Police Service stated, "We believe tens of thousands of devices were connected to the blaster over several months. We also identified more than 13 million network disruptions where devices were unable to properly connect to legitimate cell towers. That is significant because during those moments, access to services like 9-1-1 could be impacted."

Two of the men were arrested in March, while the third turned himself in last week. The defendants, who are facing 44 charges, allegedly operated the SMS blaster out of a vehicle while driving around the Toronto area.