Tech giant Apple fixed a vulnerability that "may have been leveraged in a highly sophisticated campaign against specific targeted individuals" in its iOS and iPadOS mobile operating system updates earlier this week.
According to the company's release notes for iOS 18.3.1 and iPadOS 18.3.1, the vulnerability made it possible to disable USB Restricted Mode "on a locked device." A security feature known as USB Restricted Mode was first introduced in 2018 and prevents an iPhone or iPad from sending data via a USB connection if the device hasn't been unlocked for seven days.
In order to make it more challenging for law enforcement or criminals employing forensic tools to access data on those devices, Apple announced a new security feature last year which triggers devices to reboot if they are not unlocked for 72 hours.
Based on the language used in its security update, Apple suggests that the attacks were most likely carried out with physical control of a person's device, implying that whoever exploited this vulnerability had to connect to the person's Apple devices using a forensics device such as Cellebrite or Graykey, two systems that allow law enforcement to unlock and access data stored on iPhones and other devices. Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto group that studies cyberattacks on civil society, uncovered the flaw.
However, it remains unclear who was responsible for exploiting this vulnerability and against whom it was used. However, there have been reported instances in the past in which law enforcement agencies employed forensic tools, which often exploit zero-day flaws in devices such as the iPhone, to unlock them and access the data inside.
Amnesty International published a report in December 2024 detailing a string of assaults by Serbian authorities in which they utilised Cellebrite to unlock the phones of journalists and activists in the nation before infecting them with malware. According to security experts, the Cellebrite forensic tools were probably used "widely" on members of civil society, Amnesty stated.
