How to hack an iPhone with pictures

The FORCEDENTRY malware from the Israeli company NSO Group allows you to jailbreak your iPhone using animated GIFs. The method was described in detail by an IT specialist.

“You receive a GIF, which is actually a PDF file, and they don’t accidentally copy it, but they try to read it,” he said. According to the expert, the inside contains a malicious image in an outdated format, which is usually used only by copiers.

According to him, NSO specialists managed to create an algorithm inside this file that makes it possible to write user data to the device’s memory. “Inside this” picture “there are 70,000 blocks of logical operations that simulate a small computer,” the author explained.

And the IT specialist concluded that the mechanism worked thanks to one of the features of the iMessage application – by default the program endlessly iterates GIF files, and for this it creates a copy of them. The NSO Group took advantage of this gap in the smartphone operating system.