Someone has publicly released a tool that can jailbreak millions of iPhones

Last week, cybersecurity researchers revealed a hacking campaign targeting iPhone users which used an advanced hacking tool called DarkSword. Now, someone has released a new version of DarkSword and published it on the code-sharing site GitHub.

Researchers warn that this will allow any hacker to use simple tools to target iPhone users with older Apple devices that have not yet updated to its latest iOS 26 software. This may affect hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads in active use, according to Apple’s documentation on older devices.

“This is bad. It’s easy to re-install,” Matthias Frielingsdorf, co-founder of mobile security firm iVerify, told TechCrunch on Monday. “I don’t think this can happen again. So we have to wait for terrorists and others to start sending this.”

Frielingsdorf said the new versions of the DarkSword spyware share the same tools as he and his iVerify partners. previous analysisalthough the files are slightly different. The files uploaded to GitHub are simple, HTML and JavaScript, he said, meaning anyone can copy and paste them and put them on a server “in a matter of minutes to hours.”

“This event will work well,” Frielingsdorf said. “No iOS technology required.”

Kimberly Samra, a Google spokeswoman, who previously analyzed the DarkSword exploitsaid the company’s analysts agree with Frielingsdorf’s assessment.

A security enthusiast who goes by the handle matteyeux also told TechCrunch that it’s easy to use DarkSword’s black models. Matteyeux he wrote in a post on X on Monday that he was able to hack an iPad mini tablet running iOS 18, the previous generation of the DarkSword-vulnerable operating system, using a “wild” example of DarkSword circulating on the Internet.

Apple spokeswoman Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch that the company is aware of devices running older and older versions of iOS, and issued an emergency update on March 11 for devices that cannot run the latest versions of iOS.

“Keeping your software up-to-date is the most important thing you can do to maintain the security of your Apple products,” said O’Rourke, adding that devices with updated software were not at risk from these attacks, and that. Lockdown Mode they can also prevent this attack.

A spokesperson for Microsoft, which owns GitHub, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The code, which TechCrunch is not sharing because it could be used in combat, contains several comments that explain how the tools work and how they can be used.

One comment, which may have been written by one of the developers who worked on DarkSword, says the exploit “reads and extracts important files from iOS devices via HTTP,” meaning it steals information from a person’s iPhone or iPad and sends the information over the Internet to a server controlled by the attackers.

“This payment must be entered into a system with file access class,” the comment reads.

In other words, this code refers to the “current operation,” and describes the process after the malware finds the person’s phone and captures its contents, including their messages, messages, history, and the iOS keychain, which stores Wi-Fi passwords and other secrets, and dumps them in a remote server.

Another file contains references to uploading data to a popular Ukrainian clothing website, although TechCrunch was unable to determine why. DarkSword was it is said to be used by the Russian government sabotage against Ukrainian targets.

This spyware works mainly against iPhones and iPads running iOS 18, according to iVerify, Googleand Be carefulwhich also analyzed the DarkSword malware.

According to Apple’s own numbersnearly a quarter of iPhone and iPad users are still using iOS 18 or earlier on their devices. I am more than 2.5 billion active devices, which probably equates to hundreds of millions of people whose devices are vulnerable to DarkSword.

That’s why Frielingsdorf shows everyone to change their iPhone’s operating system.

The discovery of DarkSword came just weeks after researchers discovered other high-end iPhone devices known as Coruna. As TechCrunch reported, Coruna was originally created and defense contractor L3Harris, whose Trenchant group develops weapons against the US government and its allies.