iPhone spyware toolkits leak online

34:08researchers have uncovered that two very powerful iPhone hacking toolkits Dark Sword and Karuna uh or at least parts of them uh have leaked online in a like a public GitHub repo which is basically means anyone can download this. Oh, wow. >> And historically these these these toolkits have been very lucrative for organizations to sell to nation states and intelligence community types and other non-state actors who want to have targeted hacks of, you know, if you as long as you don't have your people leaking stuff on Signal, um, you know, you want to be able to to get to them. Yeah. So, the software itself is

34:49actually not new. The actual toolkits themselves, it's general availability for the regular public is what's new. Right, yeah. This is just on GitHub. >> Right. Because normally something like this, you know, would be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars uh to be able to, you know, have someone do on your behalf to get access because obviously Apple spends a ton of money and their whole brand identity is around privacy first, we're secure, local only, yada yada yada. So, this idea that we're having government-grade exploits escape into the wild, I think is the core idea for this story. It was first reported on March 18th. It should be noted that for

35:29Dark Sword, it specifically targets iOS 18.4 through 18.62. And what's interesting about iPhones >> I'm going to check my iOS version right after this episode. >> Right. The The What I will say is, you know, for most people, you're not doing anything that anyone is going to go through the effort to target as a practical matter. But also, one of the big difference differences between Android and iOS as ecosystems and the audiences is that usually when there's new OS update, upwards of 80 to 90% of the iPhone install base just automatically accepts the auto up update. And so, the surface

36:10area of risk is relatively low, but the number looks to still be about 220 million to 270 million iPhones could still be exposed to this. So, it's it's non-zero. Um, the downloads, you know, I are trying to be taken down from GitHub because obviously Apple has a lot of control there. But there's dozens of sort of sites in the in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, etc. that you know, it's very prominent there and these are obviously areas where there's conflict active conflict happening and so I mean the story we just talked about where the astronauts on Artemis have iPhones is >> Yeah. they're not doing anything classified on there hopefully, but um the crew >> But it's of course technology that they

36:51want to preserve and protect. I was surprised that they just had off They might not be off-the-shelf. >> Yeah. But I was surprised that it was an Apple product uh that they brought with them. It's curious. With Karuna it it has a wider spectrum. It impacts iOS 13 through 17. So this is so there's Dark Sword which is the first sort of hacking protocol and then Karuna is the second one. >> Yes. And so Dark Sword is more modern