US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine


A mass hacking campaign targeting iPhone users in Ukraine and China used tools that were likely designed by U.S. military contractor L3Harris, TechCrunch has learned.

The tools, which were intended for Western spies, wound up in the hands of various hacking groups, including Russian government spooks and Chinese cybercriminals. Last week, Google revealed that over the course of 2025, it discovered that a sophisticated iPhone-hacking toolkit had been used in a series of global attacks. The toolkit, dubbed “Coruna” by its original developer, was made of 23 different components first used “in highly targeted operations” by an unnamed government customer of an unspecified “surveillance vendor.”

Read more…
Source: TechCrunch News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • DarkCrewFriends Returns with Botnet Strategy

    June 26, 2020

    The hackers-for-hire group DarkCrewFriends has resurfaced and is targeting content management systems to build a botnet. The botnet can be marshalled into service to carry out a variety of criminal activities, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, command execution, information exfiltration or sabotage of an infected system. Researchers said they observed DarkCrewFriends exploiting an unrestricted file upload ...

  • Threat Assessment: EKANS Ransomware

    June 26, 2020

    Unit 42 researchers have observed recent EKANS (Snake backward) ransomware activity affecting multiple industries in the U.S and Europe. As a result, we’ve created this threat assessment report for the activities of this ransomware. Identified techniques and campaigns can be visualized using the Unit 42 Playbook Viewer. EKANS, which was first observed in January 2020, has relatively ...

  • 23 IS conducts virtual PAI training

    June 25, 2020

    Reserve Citizen Airmen from the 23rd Intelligence Squadron organized and executed a first-ever, unit-wide Publicly Available Information (PAI) training session June 6, 2020. The goal of the training was to educate 23 IS Airmen with PAI best practices and highlight the capabilities that PAI brings to intelligence operations. The training was part of the squadron’s ...

  • Lucifer: New Cryptojacking and DDoS Hybrid Malware Exploiting High and Critical Vulnerabilities to Infect Windows Devices

    June 24, 2020

    On May 29, 2020, Unit 42 researchers discovered a new variant of a hybrid cryptojacking malware from numerous incidents of CVE-2019-9081 exploitation in the wild. A closer look revealed the malware, which we’ve dubbed “Lucifer”, is capable of conducting DDoS attacks and well-equipped with all kinds of exploits against vulnerable Windows hosts. The first wave of the ...

  • Magnitude exploit kit – evolution

    June 24, 2020

    Exploit kits are not as widespread as they used to be. In the past, they relied on the use of already patched vulnerabilities. Newer and more secure web browsers with automatic updates simply do not allow known vulnerabilities to be exploited. It was very different back in the heyday of Adobe Flash because it’s just ...

  • Fxmsp hackers made $1.5M selling access to corporate networks

    June 23, 2020

    New details have emerged on the activity of the infamous Fxmsp hacker that last year was advertising access to the networks of three cybersecurity vendors. Researchers tracking Fxmsp’s ventures on underground forums counted the network intrusions associated with this actor and revealed the presumed identity of the attacker. Fxmsp became widely known outside hacker forums about a year ...