() iPhones belonging to political figures could have been compromised and used to spy on their owners, a new report from mobile research company iVerify found.
The six affected smartphones belonging to people tied to a U.S. political campaign, media organizations, artificial intelligence companies and a European Union member state’s government had a bug that prompted rare crashes associated with the “nickname” feature in iOS.
“If they do it in a very specific way, they can corrupt the memory on your phone, which allows them to conduct what’s called a sandbox escape,” said Rocky Cole, iVerify’s chief operating officer.
That method essentially allows hackers to “get around Apple’s security architecture,” Cole said.
Researchers said bad actors may have targeted the phones starting in November 2024. Apple fixed the vulnerability with an iOS update in early March.
iVerify told it was unable to share who the phones belonged to specifically, though some reports have pointed to the Harris-Walz campaign as a potential victim.
Researchers said it’s difficult to determine who was behind the potential hacks, but they told there was a common thread between all targets: the Communist Party of China.
iVerify said all the targets had either been previously surveilled by or engaged in some sort of activism against the CCP.
Ivan Krstić, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture, pushed back on the findings in a statement to Axios.
“We’ve thoroughly analyzed the information provided by iVerify, and strongly disagree with the claims of a targeted attack against our users,” Krstić said.
The research team said they released the findings to ensure people know mobile exploitation is real and happening in the United States.
