Apple security and privacy engineers thwarted Pegasus. It was just one of their successes this year. Fast Company’s Harry McCracken speaks with Apple engineers who are creating innovative ways to protect users from a wide array of threats.
Harry McCracken for Fast Company:
For years, Apple has made privacy and security one of the iPhone’s principal selling points. But a fraction of users—including dissidents, activists, and journalists—have reason to obsess over it. Governments and others with ill intent have targeted these groups with sophisticated spyware to gain access to messages, location data, and other information that can compromise not just privacy but their physical safety. “These are attackers who are willing to spend untold millions and millions and millions of dollars going after extremely small numbers of people,” says Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić.
To combat this threat, Apple asked itself a new question, explains security engineering and architecture engineering manager Lucia Ballard: “If we design for just [this] incredibly narrow subset of people, what can we do?” Rather than introducing additional security settings addressing all the potential threats—which would leave users having to fine-tune their own level of self-defense—Ballard advocated for a single option that was more classically Apple-esque in its simplicity.
Called Lockdown Mode and released in 2022, the feature hardens iPhones — and Macs and iPads — by restricting functionality across the operating system that might let targeted spyware wriggle in. For instance, other users can’t initiate FaceTime calls with you unless you’ve called them in the past, and most kinds of message attachments are blocked.
MacDailyNews Take: With Lockdown Mode, Apple has dealt a devastating blow to mercenary spyware!
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Apple needs to release a tool for all users that is EASY to run and detect if Pegasus is already on their phone. The current tool is bad and not at all user friendly.
So you’re saying the current tool is a tool made by tools?
I agree with the previous comment. A tool to see if Pegasus is already on your phone would be greatly needed. Does anyone know if rapid battery drain is a symptom of Pegasus? Has anyone else experienced rapid battery draining since IOS 16.5.1?
Hi Michael, iMazing has offered a Pegasus Detection tool for quite some time now.
Apple’s walled garden model works! The safety is quite scenic, wouldn’t you say, aircon man?
Concerning Pegasus
They have thwarted pegasus 17 times than by your metric. Oh look another emergency fix? Either the worlds largest software company can secure their platform, which is indeed possible given they feel into the same trap Microsoft did 12 years before (more that later)** OR THEY KNOW TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN LIED TO (see false labelling of features over the last 12 months), STOLEN FROM (see well, every top 10 virus relies on the core of their system message bus), AND MURDERED (some by suicide, others by journalism), well then they would have the largest class action lawsuit case in world history.
Problem for them PR wise is they remain intentionally vague and lie to the public about the T2 ROM chip (which apparently is not (R) only nor secure). They have remarked on securing a critical webkit vulnerability that they cannot go into detail about for your own security. It’s for their own security, and they report CVE’s at a lower rate than any other software company. As of today, half of the links the do mention buried very deep in developer notes, are broken. I have had a friend that took his own life because he could not support himself. I know it’s an OCSP weapon. Steve Jobs made the platform developer friendly, they are who buys a knew MacBook every year. Now they have targeted them by neglecting their customers protection for stock value.
Coupling a single browser between 3 os’s and then integrating it with the network settings of each system, is exactly what Microsoft did when their browser was Ie9 their os was vista or 7 and their eco was Ballmer. None of those things exist anymore, except Ballmer I think who managed to lose money on buying a basketball team after saying the “iPhone would never sell because it doesn’t have buttons for the email on camera”
google webkit vulnerability update and filter by the last year. Seems like either the same whole keeps popping open or the same lie gets told over and over. How did that work out in the butterfly key thing? Im thinking this makes that look like a traffic ticket.