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Re:A US Government iPhone-Hacking Toolkit Is Now in Foreign ... by bri3d on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @05:10PM (#47239775)
I don't think the ancient nature of the exploit chain has much bearing on the origin. I think it points away from the actual 2025 campaigns being USG-attached, but I don't think anyone was suggesting that to start with - the Google report makes it pretty clear that they believe the same code was resold to several parties, either in parallel or sequentially, around this time frame.

I think the notion here is that either:

* There's a shared upstream origin or author between this toolkit and the Operation Triangulation toolkit ahead of the use in Operation Triangulation (ie - someone sold this chain to both the Operation Triangulation authors and a third party). I actually think that the uses of specifically structured code-names internally and the overall structure of the codebase described in the Google writeup make this theory less likely; building an exploit toolkit while using these practices to cosplay as a US-government affiliated engineer would be clever and fun, but it's not something we've really seen before.

* This toolkit originated from (whether it was leaked, compromised, or resold) the same actor who was responsible for Operation Triangulation.

Re:A US Government iPhone-Hacking Toolkit Is Now in Foreign ... by tptacek on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @05:46PM (#47240182)
Right, I agree with you; my thing is mostly just differentiating between CNE enablement packages the USG itself creates vs CNE enablement packages that are on offer to every USG-aligned country, of which there are a bunch.