Hacking the iPhone has long been considered a rarified endeavor, undertaken by sophisticated nation-states against only their most high-value targets. But a discovery by a group of Google researchers has turned that notion on its head: For two years, someone has been exploiting a rich collection of iPhone vulnerabilities with anything but restraint or careful targeting. And they’ve indiscriminately hacked thousands of iPhones just by getting them to visit a website.
On Thursday evening, Google’s Project Zero security research team revealed a broad campaign of iPhone hacking. A handful of websites in the wild had assembled five so-called exploit chains—tools that link together security vulnerabilities, allowing a hacker to penetrate each layer of iOS digital protections. The rare and intricate chains of code took advantage of a total of 14 security flaws, targeting everything from the browser’s “sandbox” isolation mechanism to the core of the operating system known as the kernel, ultimately gaining complete control over the phone.
