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Rotten to the core
Tame Apple Press claims Apple’s iPhone is highly secure, but government hackers don’t seem to have gotten the memo.
Last year, Google revealed that government hackers had exploited three secret holes in Apple’s iPhone systems to target victims with spyware created by a European startup.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the company’s team that investigates state-sponsored hacking, has identified several attacks carried out using hacking tools created by multiple spyware and exploit sellers, including Barcelona-based startup Variston. released a report on the attack on the government.
According to Google, in one of the attacks, government hackers used three iPhone “zero-days,” a hole that Apple was unaware of at the time of use.
In this case, the hacking tool was created by Variston, a spying and hacking technology startup whose malware has already been checked twice by Google in 2022 and 2023.
Google announced that it was discovered in March 2023 that an unidentified Variston buyer was using this zero-day to target iPhones in Indonesia.
The hacker sent an SMS text message containing a troubling link that Jobs opened because he trusted his mob. The link infected the victim’s phone with spyware and directed the victim to a news article in the Indonesian newspaper Pikiran Rakyat.
Google has not disclosed who the government buyer of Balliston is in this case. No one knows who Variston sold the spyware to. According to Google, Variston “works with several other groups to create and sell spyware.”
Google said one of those groups is Protected AE, which is based in the United Arab Emirates. Local company documents say the company was founded in 2016 as “Protect Electronic Systems” and is based in Abu Dhabi. Protect’s official website describes the company as a “leading cybersecurity and forensics company.”
Google said that Protect will “mix the spyware it creates on Heliconia’s systems and networks into a complete package and sell it to local dealers or directly to government buyers,” adding that Google is already in talks in 2022. We are talking about Variston’s software Heliconia.
Variston was founded in Barcelona in 2018 by Ralph Wegener and Ramanan Jayaraman and shortly after acquired Italian zero-day research company Truel IT.
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