Here’s What We Know About a Potential Long-Term Exploitation of a Major iPhone Security Issue

New security information has been revealed this week that could be alarming for millions of iPhone users around the world. Security experts have discovered major zero-day vulnerabilities in iPhones that allowed bad actors to gain access to high-end devices to attack and steal data, among other things.

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

Larin and his team have been investigating this problem for the past 12 months, which shows the severity of the problem and how complex it can be that they haven’t been able to determine the root cause even after this long. But some of the details shared by his team speak to the vulnerability already being a force and affecting iPhone users for at least the past four years. So how did attackers find out about this and how do they target their victims? According to the report, the infections were made through an iMessage text that was able to penetrate the device without the recipient clicking or reading it.

A similar problem with spyware was to get information such as microphone recordings, photos, device location and transfer them to a controlled server. We still have no idea how much chaos this tool has wreaked on iPhone users, but thankfully Apple has finally been made aware of the problem and they seem to have fixed these with several patches. The problem is mostly focused on Apple devices, which include Macs, iPads, Apple Watches, and even iPods.

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