Kaspersky says attackers hacked staff iPhones with unknown malware

Image Credits: Wong Yu Liang / Getty Images

The Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said that hackers working for a government targeted its employees’ iPhones with unknown malware.

On Monday, Kaspersky announced the alleged cyberattack, and published a technical report analyzing it, where the company admitted its analysis is not yet complete. The company said that the hackers, whom at this point are unknown, delivered the malware with a zero-click exploit via an iMessage attachment, and that all the events happened within a one to three minute timeframe. At this point, it’s unclear if the hackers exploited new vulnerabilities that were unpatched at the time, meaning they were so-called zero-days.

Kaspersky researchers said that they discovered the attack when they noticed “suspicious activity that originated from several iOS-based phones,” while monitoring their own corporate Wi-Fi network.

The company called this alleged hack against its own employees “Operation Triangulation,” and created a logo for it. Neither Kaspersky nor Apple immediately responded to requests for comment.

Kaspersky researchers said they created offline backups of the targeted iPhones and inspected them with a tool developed by Amnesty International called the Mobile Verification Toolkit, or MVT, which allowed them to discover “traces of compromise.” The researchers did not say when they discovered the attack, and said that they found traces of it going as far back as 2019, and that “attack is ongoing, and the most recent version of the devices successfully targeted is iOS 15.7.”

While the malware was designed to clean up the infected devices and remove traces of itself, “it is possible to reliably identify if the device was compromised,” the researchers wrote.

In the report, the researchers explained step by step how they analyzed the compromised devices, outlining how others can do the same. They did not, however, include many details of what they found using this process.

The researchers said that the presence of “data usage lines mentioning the process named ‘BackupAgent’,” was the most reliable sign that an iPhone was hacked, and that another one of…