techcrunch.com Zack Whittaker
11:15 AM PDT · August 29, 2025
A spyware vendor was behind a recent campaign that abused a vulnerability in WhatsApp to deliver an exploit capable of hacking into iPhones and Macs.
WhatsApp said on Friday that it fixed a security bug in its iOS and Mac apps that was being used to stealthily hack into the Apple devices of “specific targeted users.”

The Meta-owned messaging app giant said in its security advisory that it fixed the vulnerability, known officially as CVE-2025-55177, which was used alongside a separate flaw found in iOS and Macs, which Apple fixed last week and tracks as CVE-2025-43300.

Apple said at the time that the flaw was used in an “extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.” Now we know that dozens of WhatsApp users were targeted with this pair of flaws.

Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, who heads Amnesty International’s Security Lab, described the attack in a post on X as an “advanced spyware campaign” that targeted users over the past 90 days, or since the end of May. Ó Cearbhaill described the pair of bugs as a “zero-click” attack, meaning it does not require any interaction from the victim, such as clicking a link, to compromise their device.

The two bugs chained together allow an attacker to deliver a malicious exploit through WhatsApp that’s capable of stealing data from the user’s Apple device.

Per Ó Cearbhaill, who posted a copy of the threat notification that WhatsApp sent to affected users, the attack was able to “compromise your device and the data it contains, including messages.”

It’s not immediately clear who, or which spyware vendor, is behind the attacks.

When reached by TechCrunch, Meta spokesperson Margarita Franklin confirmed the company detected and patched the flaw “a few weeks ago” and that the company sent “less than 200” notifications to affected WhatsApp users.

The spokesperson did not say, when asked, if WhatsApp has evidence to attribute the hacks to a specific attacker or surveillance vendor.

This is not the first time that WhatsApp users have been targeted by government spyware, a kind of malware capable of breaking into fully patched devices with vulnerabilities not known to the vendor, known as zero-day flaws.

In May, a U.S. court ordered spyware maker NSO Group to pay WhatsApp $167 million in damages for a 2019 hacking campaign that broke into the devices of more than 1,400 WhatsApp users with an exploit capable of planting NSO’s Pegasus spyware. WhatsApp brought the legal case against NSO, citing a breach of federal and state hacking laws, as well as its own terms of service.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp disrupted a spyware campaign that targeted around 90 users, including journalists and members of civil society across Italy. The Italian government denied its involvement in the spying campaign. Paragon, whose spyware was used in the campaign, later cut off Italy from its hacking tools for failing to investigate the abuse.

• Aim Labs has identified a critical zero-click AI vulnerability, dubbed “EchoLeak”, in Microsoft 365 (M365) Copilot and has disclosed several attack chains that allow an exploit of this vulnerability to Microsoft's MSRC team.
• This attack chain showcases a new exploitation technique we have termed "LLM Scope Violation" that may have additional manifestations in other RAG-based chatbots and AI agents. This represents a major research discovery advancement in how threat actors can attack AI agents - by leveraging internal model mechanics.
• The chains allow attackers to automatically exfiltrate sensitive and proprietary information from M365 Copilot context, without the user's awareness, or relying on any specific victim behavior.
• The result is achieved despite M365 Copilot's interface being open only to organization employees.
• To successfully perform an attack, an adversary simply needs to send an email to the victim without any restriction on the sender's email.
• As a zero-click AI vulnerability, EchoLeak opens up extensive opportunities for data exfiltration and extortion attacks for motivated threat actors. In an ever evolving agentic world, it showcases the potential risks that are inherent in the design of agents and chatbots.
• Aim Labs continues in its research activities to identify novel types of vulnerabilities associated with AI deployment and to develop guardrails that mitigate against such novel vulnerabilities.
  Aim Labs is not aware of any customers being impacted to date.
  TL;DR
  Aim Security discovered “EchoLeak”, a vulnerability that exploits design flaws typical of RAG Copilots, allowing attackers to automatically exfiltrate any data from M365 Copilot’s context, without relying on specific user behavior. The primary chain is composed of three distinct vulnerabilities, but Aim Labs has identified additional vulnerabilities in its research process that may also enable an exploit.

Throughout late 2024 and early 2025, iVerify detected anomalous activity on iPhones belonging to individuals affiliated with political campaigns, media organizations, A.I. companies and governments operating in the United States and European Union.

Specifically, we detected exceedingly rare crashes typically associated with sophisticated zero-click attacks via iMessage – an exploitation technique previously unobserved in any systematic way in the United States. Subsequent forensic examination of several of these devices ultimately revealed a previously unknown vulnerability in the “imagent” process which, owing to its relative position in the operating system and functionality, would provide attackers a primitive for further exploitation. This vulnerability was patched by Apple in iOS 18.3. We’ve dubbed this vulnerability NICKNAME.

In the course of our investigation, we discovered evidence suggesting – but not definitively proving – this vulnerability was exploited in targeted attacks as recently as March of this year. Specifically, we learned that Apple sent Threat Notifications to at least one device belonging to a senior government official in the EU on which we saw the highly anomalous crashes. Likewise, one device demonstrated behavior frequently associated with successful exploitation, specifically the creation and deletion of iMessage attachments in bulk within a matter of seconds on several occasions after an anomalous crash. We only observed these crashes on devices belonging to extremely high value targets. And these crashes constituted only .0001% of the crash log telemetry taken from a sample of 50,000 iPhones.

I found a zero-click vulnerability in macOS Calendar, which allows an attacker to add or delete arbitrary files inside the Calendar sandbox environment. This could lead to many bad things including malicious code execution which can be combined with security protection evasion with Photos to compromise users’ sensitive Photos iCloud Photos data. Apple has fixed all of the vulnerabilities between October 2022 and September 2023.

The patch is the latest to address issues associated with what cybersecurity firm Kaspersky called Operation Triangulation.

Microsoft analyzes a threat group tracked as DEV-0196, the actor’s iOS malware “KingsPawn”, and their link to an Israel-based private sector offensive actor (PSOA) known as QuaDream, which reportedly sells a suite of exploits, malware, and infrastructure called REIGN, that’s designed to exfiltrate data from mobile devices.

At least five civil society victims of QuaDream’s spyware and exploits were identified in North America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Victims include journalists, political opposition figures, and an NGO worker. Traces of a suspected iOS 14 zero-click exploit used to deploy QuaDream’s spyware.

A flaw in Apple's software exploited by Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group to break into iPhones in 2021 was simultaneously abused by a competing company, according to five people familiar with the matter.