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Russian authorities used Cellebrite's UFED forensic tools to break into the iPhone of detained opposition activist Andrey Pivovarov in June 2021, three months after Cellebrite said it would stop selling its tools and services to Russia and Belarus. The finding, published  June 25 by the Citizen Lab , rests on two things that rarely line up: traces on the phone itself and an official Russian government report that names the tool. Investigators searched the extracted data for political contacts, opposition figures, and the names of activist organizations. This was not remote spyware. It was a forensic tool run on a seized device in custody, used to build a case in a political prosecution. Pivovarov ran Open Russia , an opposition group the Kremlin had branded "undesirable," a label that turned continued involvement into a criminal offense. He was  pulled off a flight  at St. Petersburg airport on May 31, 2021, and his iPhone 12 and MacBook were confiscated. He neve...

Security researchers at Paradigm Shift have published a working exploit, dubbed  usbliter8 , that achieves arbitrary code execution inside the SecureROM of Apple's A12 and A13 chips. That code is burned into the silicon at manufacture. No software update can reach it. Affected devices will carry this flaw for as long as they stay in use. This is not a remote attack. It requires physical possession of the device, which must be in DFU mode and connected via USB to a dedicated RP2350-based microcontroller board. With that setup, the exploit finishes in under two seconds, before Apple's signed boot chain loads. The full  technical write-up  and a working  proof of concept  went public on June 18, 2026, following coordinated disclosure with Apple Product Security. Affected Devices The public PoC supports A12, A13, S4, and S5 SoCs. A12X and A12Z support is described as theoretically possible but not yet implemented. Device families in that range...

Apple has released iOS and iPadOS updates to address two security issues, one of which could have allowed a user's passwords to be read out aloud by its VoiceOver assistive technology. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-44204, has been described as a logic problem in the new Passwords app impacting a slew of iPhones and iPads. Security researcher Bistrit Daha has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. "A user's saved passwords may be read aloud by VoiceOver," Apple said in an advisory released this week, adding it was resolved with improved validation.  The shortcoming impacts the following devices - iPhone XS and later iPad Pro 13-inch iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later iPad Air 3rd generation and later iPad 7th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later Also patched by Apple is a security vulnerability (CVE-2024-44207) specific to the newly launched iPhone 16 mo...

Apple on Wednesday rolled out security patches to address a new zero-day flaw in iOS and iPadOS that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-42824 , the kernel vulnerability could be abused by a local attacker to elevate their privileges. The iPhone maker said it addressed the problem with improved checks. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS before iOS 16.6," the company  noted  in a terse advisory. While additional details about the nature of the attacks and the identity of the threat actors perpetrating them are currently unknown, successful exploitation likely hinges on an attacker already obtaining an initial foothold by some other means. Apple's latest update also resolves  CVE-2023-5217  impacting the WebRTC component, which Google last week described as a heap-based buffer overflow in the VP8 compression format in libvpx. The patches, iOS 17.0.3 an...

The iPhone belonging to Galina Timchenko, a prominent Russian journalist and critic of the government, was compromised with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, a new collaborative investigation from  Access Now  and the  Citizen Lab  has revealed. The infiltration is said to have happened on or around February 10, 2023. Timchenko is the executive editor and owner of  Meduza , an independent news publication based in Latvia. It's currently not clear who deployed the malware on the device. The Washington Post  reported  that the Russian government is not a client of NSO Group, citing an unnamed person familiar with the company's operations. "During the infection her device was localized to the GMT+1 timezone, and she reports being in Berlin, Germany," the Citizen Lab said. "The day following the infection she was scheduled to attend a private meeting with other heads of Russian independent media exiled in Europe to discuss how to manage threats and censorsh...