California, August 30: Google’s external security team-led researchers have revealed an unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked “thousands of users a week” until it was disrupted in January. The research team reported that the hacking operation lasted two and a half years and used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors.

According to Google, the hackers implemented the formula where the users were compromised simply by visiting the sites. The formula was simple - no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones. However, after the phones were hacked, the user’s deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Google Job Search Tool Faces EU Anti-Trust Probe

Among the major concerns of this malware were that users' location was uploaded every minute, device's keychain, passwords, chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database became available to the hacker. Apart from this, another concerning factor was the non-persistence of implantation. Means whenever the phone was restarted, the malware was cleared from memory unless the user revisited a compromised site.

A security researcher at Google, Ian Beer, stated that in total 14 bugs were exploited for the iOS attack across five different “exploit chains”. They state that this malware functions in such a way that a hacker can hop from bug to bug, increasing the severity of their attack each time. Though Google claims that it had reported the security issues to Apple on February 1, Apple released an operating system update which fixed the flaws on 7 February 7.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 30, 2019 08:29 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).