iPhone Hacking Apps Revealed

The days are gone when phone hacking was just something you saw in movies or read about on conspiracy websites. Nowadays it’s available to more people than ever before and there are a wealth of options available to someone wishing to gain access to and monitor somebodies iPhone.

In this article we’re going to look at the various cell spy apps available for iPhones, the features they offer and what you can do to detect and avoid them.

Other iPhone Hacking Tools

There are some hacking apps for iphone that are not available to consumers, but that have still made the news in recent years.

In 2015 it was revealed Milan-based company Hacking Team had developed a highly sophisticated iOS spyware tool and was selling to governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide. It requires a jailbreak and once installed provides monitoring of chat (Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber), location, contacts, and list of calls. It was also rumoured that the company had developed a spyware tool that does not require a jailbreak. It worked by exploiting a legitimate Apple enterprise certificate which was possessed by the company at the time. Hacking Team used this certificate to sign an app, that was actually spyware and hide it within the native ‘Newsstand’ app within iOS

More recently, in August 2016 there were reports that a number of political dissidents had received suspicious links in text messages to their iPhones. It turns out the link contained a targeted spyware product called ‘Pegasus’. If the link was clicked, Pegasus would use a chain of exploits nicknamed Trident to silently jailbreak the device and then install malware to monitor messages, calls, emails, FaceTime, Calendar and many more.

It’s important to state that after they were made public, Apple did release security patches for the two threats discussed above that target non-jailbroken phones. But it does it bring into question, how many other vulnerabilities have not yet been discovered and patched by Apple?