Apple's iOS operating system is generally considered secure, certainly enough for most users most of the time. But in recent years hackers have successfully found a number of flaws that provide entry points into iPhones and iPads. Many of these have been what are called zero-click or interactionless attacks that can infect a device without the victim so much as clicking a link or downloading a malware-laced file. Time and again these weaponized vulnerabilities turned out to be in Apple's chat app, iMessage. But now it appears that Apple has had enough. New research shows that the company took iMessage's defenses to a whole other level with the release of iOS 14 in September.
At the end of December, for example, researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab published findings on a hacking campaign from the summer in which attackers successfully targeted dozens of Al Jazeera journalists with a zero-click iMessages attack to install NSO Group's notorious Pegasus spyware. Citizen Lab said at the time that it didn't believe iOS 14 was vulnerable to the hacking used in the campaign; all the victims were running iOS 13, which was current at the time.
Samuel Groß has long investigated zero-click iPhone attacks alongside a number of his colleagues at Google's apple fixes iphone pressing security risks
