A new research shows that hackers still rely on old numbers to gain access to iPhone and Android devices. Here are the details.

A Growing Trend of Government Agencies Renting Out Hack Operations

According to a situation noted by TechCrunch, three cybersecurity research companies collaborated to produce complementary reports detailing a years-long rental campaign targeting journalists, activists, and officials in the Middle East and North Africa.

According to findings shared by Access Now, Lookout, and SMEX, the attacks targeted civilians and government officials in most regions; additionally, “graduates from the United Kingdom and possibly the United States or American universities” were also targeted, according to TechCrunch.

Access Now investigated three attack incidents that occurred between 2023 and 2025; Lookout associated them with the BITTER APT group, which is a subsidiary of the “Indian hack for hire initiative Appin.”

Unlike the Coruna exploit and DarkSword exploit attacks, this campaign relied on much less sophisticated tactics; these included phishing:

“In the attacks that were part of this campaign, hackers used several different techniques. While targeting iPhone users, hackers tried to trick the targets into providing their Apple ID credentials; this gave them access to iCloud backups and thus allowed them to reach the full content of the targets' iPhones.”

Lookout's report contains nearly 1,500 different web addresses designed to mimic legitimate services, but used to host phishing pages and other malicious infrastructure.

Those specific to Apple included:

  • facetime-web[.]me-en[.]io
  • apple[.]id-us[.]cc
  • icloud[.]com-ar[.]me
  • icloud[.]com-service[.]info
  • signin-apple[.]com-en-uk[.]info

As noted in the reports, the campaign was not limited to Apple; it also targeted users and services of companies like Google, Microsoft, Signal, WhatsApp, and Yahoo with various hacking and phishing techniques.

TechCrunch added that this campaign indicates a growing trend of “government agencies renting out hack operations to private hacking rental companies.”:

These groups and their clients obtain “reasonable deniability since they run all the operations and infrastructure.” It was noted for their clients that these hacking rental groups could be cheaper than purchasing commercial malware, said [Justin Albrecht, Lookout's chief researcher].

You can find TechCrunch's report here.

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