[defaulty]

This report says they discovered this in March.

The NY Times [1] just reported that "Apple’s security team has been working around the clock to develop a fix since Tuesday, after researchers at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization at the University of Toronto, discovered that a Saudi activist’s iPhone had been infected with spyware from NSO Group."

What took so long? Did Apple not know about this in March or was someone sitting on it for 6 months?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/technology/apple-software...

[robocat]

“Citizen Lab forwarded the artifacts to Apple on Tuesday September 7.” — from article, no need to jump to unwarranted conclusions about Apple. “In March 2021, we examined the phone of a Saudi activist” - it would be interesting to know the reason why Citizen Lab delayed so long. Hopefully they just wanted time to discover who else was being targeted?

[dezfuli]

> In March 2021, we examined the phone of a Saudi activist who has chosen to remain anonymous, and determined that they had been hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. During the course of the analysis we obtained an iTunes backup of the device.

> Recent re-analysis of the backup yielded several files with the “.gif” extension in Library/SMS/Attachments that we determined were sent to the phone immediately before it was hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.

Seems like they originally examined the phone in March, but recently did another analysis, during the course of which they discovered the exploit and reported it to Apple.

[badRNG]

I assume it takes time to go from "this person could have potentially been targeted with Pegasus" to "this person's iPhone was exploited by Pegasus, and here is how they did it."