Project Zero, a Google cybersecurity team, revealed in early 2019 that it had discovered a major hacking attack on iPhones, an attack that Motherboard said could be “the biggest ever”. A series of Project Zero blog posts explained that iPhone owners needed to visit certain sites to trigger the attack, and that the attack allowed hackers to have access to everything on iPhones. Apple sorted it out in February, five days after the confidential report it received from Google. But Project Zero wrote that the attacks are thought to have gone on for at least two years, on sites visited by thousands of users every week. In addition, although this attack has been detected and blocked, Project Zero writes that there may be many more similar ones, which have not yet been discovered.
Project Zero explained that the malicious sites, whose addresses are not known for now, passed to the iPhones a malware (a malicious software) that installed itself and indiscriminately on every iPhone that worked with a version of iOS, the Apple operating system, between 10 and 12. The Verge explains that in many cases attacks of this type are activated if the user clicks on a certain link, and are almost always directed towards a more or less specific target of users. In this case, however, it was a general attack.
Once the malware was installed, hackers had “root” access to users' iPhones – the deepest level, which allowed them to view photos, files, messages, locations, and even passwords. The Verge wrote that hackers had access to the entire keychain of the attacked iPhones, resulting in the ability to see any password or certificate within it.
Going a little more specifically, Project Zero explained that 14 types of vulnerabilities (flaws in the iPhone system, say) were found across five different “exploit chains” (say five different “viruses”). It means that different types of attacks had been devised, hitting different leaks from time to time. This made it very difficult to understand that there was an attack in progress and to take action to neutralize it. To get rid of the malware present in the iPhone, it was enough to restart it. The problem is that in the meantime the hackers had been able to gain access to passwords and access data to other sites and services.
Apple – whose iPhones are considered very safe and effective in avoiding attacks and viruses – quickly solved the problems that Project Zero had reported to it and in the iOS 12.1.4 update made the necessary corrections to its operating system. But as Project Zero wrote: “For one attack we have seen, there are almost certainly others that we have not yet discovered”.
