Right, probably. No one knows who else might have used it, though.

What's kind of sad is that this story was not used to enlighten the general population on how exactly the modern information security works (which can be reduced to "nothing is secure").

Which it can be. Especially because Apple's statement shows who the attacker was and who they were attacking. I mean if Trump used an attack like this to target Muslims people would be screaming their heads off about government overreach and violations of privacy. And that's essentially what happened here.

> headlines of "1 billion iPhones hacked"

That wasn't an actual headline though. You can find: "Google Warns 1 Billion Apple Users They May Have Been Attacked." Which is quite different and doesn't conform to your complaint as well.

That was a generic headline I condensed from the results of a quick search. Here's one that was the top result for me in DuckDuckGo: https://www.pymnts.com/apple/2019/google-says-billion-apple-...

So you created it, and then used its wording as the focus of your complaint. And your link has the same headline I referenced above, which is quite different in tone and implication.

I just read the article I linked a bit more closely, and it's worse than I thought: pretty much everything in it is wrong.

> The details of the exploits are being kept a secret

They are not.

> Four out of the six bugs can trigger a malicious code on an iOS device, and a user doesn’t even need to do anything. Simply sending the message to the phone will execute the code once a person opens and looks at the message.

No.

The article also fails to mention that the the bugs targeted previous versions of iOS and have been fixed by Apple. And finally, the title makes it clear that "1B Apple users could be hacked", which is categorically false and much closer in meaning to my headline than yours.