Closed-source hardware and software, like a pinata of vulnerability. You never know when and how you’re hit.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Researchers on Wednesday presented intriguing new findings surrounding an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky.

Chief among the discoveries: the unknown attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of.

“The exploit’s sophistication and the feature’s obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities,” Kaspersky researcher Boris Larin wrote in an email.

“Our analysis hasn’t revealed how they became aware of this feature, but we’re exploring all possibilities, including accidental disclosure in past firmware or source code releases.

A fresh infusion of details disclosed Wednesday said that “Triangulation”—the name Kaspersky gave to both the malware and the campaign that installed it—exploited four critical zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning serious programming flaws that were known to the attackers before they were known to Apple.

The researchers found that several of MMIO addresses the attackers used to bypass the memory protections weren’t identified in any device tree documentation, which acts as a reference for engineers creating hardware or software for iPhones.

The original article contains 653 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

I think the most important takeaway here is that apple has a backdoor to memory isolated processes.