Google researchers say security flaws were found in web browser Safari, affecting phones which had visited compromised sites.
Hackers have been using malicious software to harvest photos and contacts from iPhones for years, researchers at Google have claimed, potentially affecting millions of people.
The monitoring - which gathers images and other information from iPhones which have visited compromised websites - is said to have affected devices running operating systems from iOS 10, released in 2016, to iOS 12. Apps including Instagram, WhatsApp and Gmail would have been vulnerable to being accessed, potentially exposing personal data, on handsets hit by the so-called"monitoring implants".Project Zero, a team of security researchers at Google, said most of the security flaws were found within Safari, the default web browser on Apple devices, with the hacked sites having received thousands of visitors a week.
In a blog post, Project Zero expert Ian Beer said:"There was no target discrimination; simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, to install a monitoring implant."Although the implant is not saved on the device itself, it is capable of providing hackers with access whenever the owner visits a compromised website, Mr Beer said.
But while they would only have had access to the phone during those visits, hackers may have ended up with persistent access to other accounts and services by using stolen authentication tokens from the keychain - where the iPhone stores passwords and other login information.
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