Apple Confirms Zero-Day Attacks Hitting macOS Systems

The article sounds like it also applies to iOS

    The company urged users across the Apple
    ecosystem to apply the urgent iOS 18.1.1,
    macOS Sequoia 15.1.1 and the older iOS 17.7.2.

And that it is web based

    maliciously crafted web content may lead
    to arbitrary code execution

Has this happened before? That iPhones had a security hole that could be exploited over the web?

Absolutely. I don’t follow the scene, but early in the iphone’s product life I distinctly remember a web-based jailbreak, where you loaded a page and then you could ‘slide to jailbreak’. I don’t know if user action was strictly required, or if it was a UX thing.

Shouldn't that lead to a massive amount of iPhones being broken into?

If not, why?

If so, what happened to all those phones?

I never hear stories like "My iPhone was broken into and this happened: ..."

Why would it?

Do you regularly visit "hot-iphone-porn-apps.info" and other untrusted sites? Do you expect sites you do visit, like "google.com" or such, are going to serve up malware?

Do you expect hackers who build these very labor-intensive exploit chains will want to try and hit as many low-value targets as possible, leading to apple patching the exploit quickly, or to try and hit high-value targets only so it's not noticed by apple as quickly and can be used against more high-value targets to make more money in total than doing a "spray and pray" with it?

What thought process do you think would lead to using the exploit against as many people as possible vs selling it to zerodium.com or a similar company for more money than you can get from spraying, and then zerodium reselling it to israel to hack into the iphones of a few key palestinians?