they hacked her iphone with a fake gif

The backup had 31 files in it with names ending in .gif. Twenty-seven of them were identical, 748 bytes each, and were not GIFs at all but Photoshop documents, decoys. The other four were PDFs. The PDFs were not GIFs either.

The phone belonged to Loujain al-Hathloul. She is the Saudi activist who drove a car toward the Saudi border from the UAE in 2014 to protest the ban on women driving, who was arrested in May 2018, held for nearly three years, and released in February 2021 under a travel ban. Within weeks of getting out she had spyware on her iPhone. She had not tapped anything. She had not opened a message. The attack came in over iMessage as an attachment, and the phone processed it on arrival the way it processes every image, in the background, before a notification had a chance to show.

The software was Pegasus, sold by the Israeli company NSO Group and built to leave no trace. This time it left one. A glitch left a copy of the exploit sitting in her backup, and when she handed the phone to Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, they found it. They named it FORCEDENTRY, sent it to Apple on September 7, 2021, and Apple patched every iPhone, iPad, Mac and Watch six days later, on September 13. The entry in the vulnerability database is CVE-2021-30860. I posted it to the group chat the morning after: iPhone, iMessage, zero day, zero click.

the computer in the picture

Apple handed a sample to Google's Project Zero, and in December they published what was inside. This is the part that still sounds made up.

The four PDFs carried image data in a format called JBIG2. It is a compression scheme from the fax era, for black-and-white scans. A scanned page of text repeats the same letter shapes thousands of times, so JBIG2 stores each shape once, then a list of instructions for where to stamp it, and the instructions can combine one stamp with another using the basic logical operations, AND, OR, XOR. There was a bug in how Apple's parser counted those shapes. Overflow the count and the instructions can read and write memory they were never meant to touch.

NSO's engineers did not stop at the bug. Using nothing but those logical operations on bitmaps, more than 70,000 instructions of them, they built a small computer inside the image, with registers and a full 64-bit adder. Then they ran the rest of the break-in on that computer, in a language of their own, inside a picture, inside a parser, inside a message nobody had opened. Project Zero, whose whole job is reading exploits, called it one of the most technically sophisticated they had ever seen. The crew built the getaway car out of the vault door.

The aftermath reads like a price war. Apple sued NSO Group in November 2021. In July 2022 it announced Lockdown Mode, a switch that turns off most of the attack surface, image attachments included, and doubled the bounty for anyone who could get through it to $2 million. I posted that one too. In September 2024 Apple asked a court to let it drop its own lawsuit, saying that pressing on risked exposing what it knew about the people it was fighting. Those people are still in business. What one of their products sells for is the next story.

the human version

The industry word is zero-click. There is no mistake you made. You did not fall for anything. All you did was own a phone, and the message only had to arrive.

You know the human version already. A name on the lock screen at 1 a.m. and a preview that cuts off right before the verb. You do not open it. You swipe it away, so technically nothing happened, and then it runs in the background through the shower, the drive in, the meeting, dinner, and it is still running on Thursday.

I have a lyric somewhere about keeping the phone on silent, as if that were a defense. It is a setting for the ringer. The parser still runs.

i made a mess of things, maybe i missed the messages

The message you never opened does not need you to open it. It only has to arrive.

The painting: Fra Angelico, The Annunciation (c. 1426), Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

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