Major iPhone Security Issue Might Have Been Exploited For Years: Here’s What We Know

New security details have been revealed this week which could be alarming for millions of iPhone users across the globe. Security experts have found major zero-day vulnerabilities in iPhones that allowed bad actors to get high level access to the devices to attack and steal data among others.

The biggest problem with these details is that researchers haven’t been able to crack the source of the vulnerability, which they feel could be linked to some hardware components in the iPhone. Boris Larin, Kaspersky researcher, quoted in this report, has shared these concerns via an email without exactly telling how they were able to figure out the zero-day issues in iPhones.

Larin and his team have been investigating this issue for the past 12 months which shows the severity of the problem and how complex it could be that even after this long they haven’t been able to determine the root cause. But some of the details shared by his team talk about the vulnerability already being a force and affecting iPhone users over the last four years at least. So, how did the attackers come to know of this issue and how did they target their victims? The report says, the infections were done via iMessage text that was capable of intruding the device without the receiver clicking or reading it.

The spyware-like issue was being able to get data like mic recordings, photos, the location of the device and move them to a controlled server. We still don’t have any idea how much of a chaos this tool has made on iPhone users, but thankfully, Apple was finally informed about the issue and they seem to have fixed these via multiple patches. The problem is mostly focused on Apple devices, which includes the Macs, iPads, Apple Watches and even the iPods.

Larin has called it one of the most sophisticated exploits ever, and targeting iPhones at this level needs heavy expertise and technical know-how to deceive Apple and continue to target people for years.