When Apple released a new version of iOS last summer in the middle of Marczak’s investigation, the phone’s new security features killed an unauthorized “jailbreak” tool Citizen Lab used to open up the iPhone. Sometimes the locked-down system can backfire even more directly. It was strong evidence pointing toward a hack using the Israeli company’s software, but it didn’t expose the hack itself. They persevered by looking indirectly at the phone’s internet traffic to see who it was whispering to, until finally, in July last year, researchers saw the phone pinging servers belonging to NSO. The Al Jazeera journalist Tamer Almisshal contacted Citizen Lab after he received death threats about his work in January 2020, but Marczak’s team initially found no direct evidence of hacking on his iPhone. This means that even to know you’re under attack, you may have to rely on luck or vague suspicion rather than clear evidence. And once they’re that deep inside, the security becomes a barrier that keeps investigators from spotting or understanding nefarious behavior-to the point where Marczak suspects they’re missing all but a small fraction of attacks because they cannot see behind the curtain. These allow attackers to burrow into the restricted parts of the phone without ever giving the target any indication of having been compromised. He argues that while the iPhone’s security is getting tighter as Apple invests millions to raise the wall, the best hackers have their own millions to buy or develop zero-click exploits that let them take over iPhones invisibly.
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