Russia claims iPhones were hacked, blames US

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Russia’s Federal Security Service said on Monday that several thousand iPhones in the country had been hacked in a newly discovered spy campaign that it attributed to the US government, without providing evidence.

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab said the campaign planted file-stealing malware on the iPhones of its employees who were running a year-old version of Apple’s mobile operating system, adding that it does not There wasn’t enough evidence to blame any government or group for the violations. .

Kaspersky said it believed the infections started with an iMessage attachment without any user interaction, a vector similar to that used by spyware vendor Pegasus NSO Group and rivals that sell to government agencies around the world. entire. A Kaspersky spokesperson told the Washington Post that researchers were still analyzing the campaign and did not have enough technical evidence to attribute it to anyone.

But the Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed the effort had ensnared thousands of casualties, including diplomats stationed there; that the United States was behind it; and that the existence of the vulnerability showed that Apple had collaborated with US government hackers.

Apple has denied the accusation, with a spokesperson saying: We have never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into an Apple product and we never will.

A Kremlin spokesperson added that the government considers iPhones to be inherently dangerous.

The FSB said the hacked diplomats came from countries like China and Israel, whose foreign ministries did not respond to requests for comment.

Kaspersky said none of the affected devices were running an operating system newer than iOS 15.7, which was replaced in September 2022, and none of them were running in lockdown mode, an optional setting that reduces the number of ways iPhones can be attacked, including limiting iMessage functionality.

A high-end government spy operation would more typically take advantage of an unpublished flaw, known as zero-day, that works even against fully up-to-date software. The devices of diplomats and private security experts are constant targets of international espionage.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Kaspersky didn’t release much that would allow Apple to determine which vulnerability was used, and it notified the company overnight, hours before the FSB announced its findings.

The security firm, which often works with Russian authorities, released a list of obscure websites that had been used to communicate with infected phones, along with technical indicators of compromise that users could use to check their own devices.

Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.

correction

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect date for the iOS 15.7 replacement. It was in September 2022. The article has been corrected.

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