TECHWHOKNOWS

I watched the recent Veritasium video where they pulled $10,000 from Marques Brownlee's bank account while his iPhone sat locked and face-down on a table. He never touched the screen or used FaceID. The core vulnerability relies on a feature Apple introduced in 2019: Express Transit Mode. Professors Ioana Boureanu and Tom Chothia from the University of Surrey published the blueprint for this attack in September 2021. Hackers use a $300 Proxmark scanner to broadcast the exact signal a transit gate uses. When your iPhone receives that signal, it skips the biometric check. The attackers then run a Python script to intercept the unencrypted communication between your phone and a retail card reader. They flip a single binary digit to trick the phone so it registers a $10,000 charge as a cheap train ticket. They alter another digit to tell the card reader you already authenticated the payment. This specific exploit only works if you have a Visa card set as your Express Transit card on an iPhone. Mastercard stops this attack because they rely on asymmetric cryptography; if anyone alters the data, the mathematical seal breaks and the transaction fails. Samsung phones also block it. Their system forces transit transactions to clear at exactly zero dollars so the provider can bill the user later. Visa built an architecture that skips the digital signature check if the payment terminal stays online. The hackers just keep the terminal connected to the internet and Visa approves the forged transaction. However, Visa leans on their Zero Liability policy to refund victims later. To wait weeks for a bank to return a stolen rent payment is a massive headache for the user. Find out more here: https://techwhoknows.com/tech/why-your-locked-iphone-might-be-less-secure-than-you-think