The iPhone-hacking campaign Google uncovered upends those assumptions. Since an iPhone hacking technique was estimated at the time to cost $1 million or more-as much as $2 million today, according to some published prices-attacks against dissidents like Mansour were thought to be expensive, stealthy, and highly focused as a rule. The campaign should dispel the notion, writes Google Project Zero researcher Ian Beer, that every iPhone hacking victim is a ' million-dollar dissident'-a nickname given to now-imprisoned UAE human rights activist Ahmed Mansour in 2016 after his iPhone was hacked. It also represents a deep shift in how the security community thinks about rare zero-day attacks and the economics of 'targeted' hacking. 'The prevailing wisdom and math has been incorrect.' The sites were active since at least 2017, and had thousands of visitors per week. Almost every version of iOS 10 through iOS 12 was potentially vulnerable. Google's researchers say the malicious sites were programmed to assess devices that loaded them, and to compromise them with powerful monitoring malware if possible. They were also used anything but sparingly.

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. 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. On Thursday evening, Google's Project Zero security research team revealed a broad campaign of iPhone hacking. And they've indiscriminately hacked thousands of iPhones just by getting them to visit a website. 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. Hacking the iPhone has long been considered a rarified endeavor, undertaken by sophisticated nation-states against only their most high-value targets.

Ios hacking software