Saudi woman’s single iPhone revealed hacking around the world

A single iPhone, Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathlou’s, helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most notorious spyware companies that’s now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.
iPhone passcode lock screen
Reuters:

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.
An unusual error in NSO’s spyware allowed Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers.
After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target.
He said the finding, computer code left by the attack, provided direct evidence NSO built the espionage tool. “It was a game changer,” said Marczak “We caught something that the company thought was uncatchable.”
Citizen Lab named this new iPhone hacking method “ForcedEntry.” The researchers then provided the sample to Apple last September. Having a blueprint of the attack in hand allowed Apple to fix the critical vulnerability and led them to notify thousands of other iPhone users who were targeted by NSO software, warning them they had been targeted by “state-sponsored attackers.”

MacDailyNews Note: Last November, Apple sued NSO Group over state-sponsored surveillance and the targeting of Apple users. Soon after, Apple began alerting users who may have been targeted by NSO Group.
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