The campaign, which has been running for at least two years, with spyware installed on the visitors' iPhones, was allegedly directed against the Uyghur minority in China. The report "TechCrunch" and "Forbes", citing "persons who are familiar with the matter". Responsible for the surveillance campaign is therefore "likely" the Chinese government.
Google had published an analysis of the campaign last week. The company had uncovered five unspecified Web sites that could potentially infect "Thousands of iPhones a Week" with powerful surveillance software once the devices called only one of the sites. Although the software remained on an affected device only until the next reboot, it was also able to read chats from various messenger apps, send files such as pictures and emails to the attacker's server, and access passwords.
This was based on five different chains of so-called exploits - malware that exploits security vulnerabilities. Several of them were publicly unknown at the time of their deployment. A defense was therefore not possible, even if an iPhone had installed the latest version of the Apple operating system iOS.
Android and Windows users were also targeted
Who was behind the attacks and who were the likely victims, Google had not communicated. In Google's analysis, the adversary's address was blurred, but a list of affected messenger apps includes many popular Chinese services. In addition, the author of the report wrote: "To become a goal, it could be enough to just be born in a particular region or to be part of a particular ethnic group." However, any iPhone was infected, no matter where it accessed the contaminated sites.
According to "Forbes" but not only iPhone, but also Android and Windows users were infected - on the same websites. That would have confirmed several sources. Google had not mentioned these attacks and apparently did not detect them.
China's government controls the Uighurs in Xinjiang province with great technical effort. Beijing sees it as an obstacle to building a "harmonious society".