SolarWinds hackers used iOS zero-day to penetrate iPhones used by government officials in iOS edited July 14 A newly uncovered zero-day exploit impacting older versions of iOS was leveraged by Russia-backed hackers in a campaign that targeted officials of Western European governments. Outlined by Google's Threat Analysis team in a report on Wednesday, the attack involved messages sent to government officials over LinkedIn. Victims who visited a provided link on their iOS device would be redirected to a domain that served up an initial malicious payload that subsequently examined device authenticity. After multiple validation checks were satisfied, a final payload containing the CVE-2021-1879 exploit was downloaded and used to bypass certain security protections.