Researchers at the Digital Security Group Citizen Lab said they had found spyware linked to the Israeli company NSO, which exploited a newly discovered bug in Apple's devices.
The group said in a statement that while examining the Apple device of an employee of a civil society group in Washington last week, it was found that the bug had been used to infect the device with NSO's Pegasus spyware.
Bill Marczak, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told Reuters: "The indications confirm with high confidence the responsibility of NSO's Pegasus spyware for the hacking operation, based on the forensic evidence we obtained from the target device."
He noted that the attacker likely made a mistake during the installation, and that's how Citizen Lab's engineers found the spyware.
The Citizen Lab statement said the hack, known as Blastings, was capable of hacking iPhones running the latest version of iOS 16.6 without any intervention from the victim.
Citizen Lab immediately revealed to Apple its findings and confirmed that it would publish a more detailed discussion about the future exploitation chain.
Apple released updates to its systems related to the exploit chain, and the statement "Citizen Lab" urged everyone to update their devices immediately, and said that Apple's security engineering team assured them that the new updates prohibit this particular attack.
This latest discovery shows once again that civil society is being targeted by highly sophisticated exploits and sophisticated spyware, according to Citizen Lab.
The U.S. government has blacklisted the Israeli company since 2021 for alleged abuses, including surveillance of government officials and journalists.