Secret US iPhone Hacking Toolkit Falls Into Hands Of Foreign Hackers

A sophisticated iPhone hacking toolkit, suspected to have originated within U.S. government-linked development circles, has surfaced in the wild as a weapon used by both foreign intelligence services and opportunistic cybercriminals. It's uncertain how the toolkit, dubbed "Coruna" by researchers, landed outside of the government, although the general consensus is that the leak was by accident.

Security analysts at Google’s Threat Intelligence Group and the mobile security firm iVerify recently identified and deconstructed the toolkit, revealing a massive library of 23 exploits organized into five distinct chains, the latter created to bypass Apple’s stringent security mitigations, allowing attackers to seize full control of iPhones running iOS versions ranging from 13.0 (released in 2019) to 17.2.1 (released in 2023). While the underlying vulnerabilities have since been patched by Apple, the toolkit's existence in the wild poses ...