Are You Safe From Zero-Click Attacks? How Hackers Can Take Over Your Phone Without You Touching It
What appears to be a simple message can invisibly infiltrate your mobile device, even if you never open it. Suddenly, your phone is leaking all of your personal information, calls, and media to a distant attacker without your knowledge. At the Black Hat security conference, Natalie Silvanovich and Ivan Fratric from Google’s Project Zero demonstrated that these attacks can still affect modern platforms, showing two distinct zero-click exploits on the Pixel 9 and Pixel 10.
- ▪What appears to be a simple message can invisibly infiltrate your mobile device, even if you never open it.
- ▪Suddenly, your phone is leaking all of your personal information, calls, and media to a distant attacker without your knowledge.
- ▪At the Black Hat security conference, Natalie Silvanovich and Ivan Fratric from Google’s Project Zero demonstrated that these attacks can still affect modern platforms, showing two distinct zero-click exploits on the Pixel 9 and Pixel 10.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/black-hat-2026-zero-click-attacks-how-hackers-can-take-over-your-phone |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 26 15:42:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T15:50:47.675Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T15:50:47.675Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | H-D4ZIu3jZbk · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
LAS VEGAS—Some attacks have no defense. What appears to be a simple message can invisibly infiltrate your mobile device, even if you never open it. Suddenly, your phone is leaking all of your personal information, calls, and media to a distant attacker without your knowledge. That exploit is called a zero-click attack. At the Black Hat security conference, Natalie Silvanovich and Ivan Fratric from Google’s Project Zero demonstrated that these attacks can still affect modern platforms, showing two distinct zero-click exploits on the Pixel 9 and Pixel 10. Project Zero is a team of security analysts whose goal is to find and report zero-day exploits that could impact Google's ecosystem of devices. Their job is to hack devices and patch exploits before malicious actors do.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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