Magnet Forensics sues former contractor for leaking iPhone exploit

General
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Magnet Forensics (the company behind GrayKey) filed a lawsuit on July 7th against a former Exploit Engineer who worked with them and his new company (Paradigm Shift Technology). According to the complaint, the ex-employee had access to one of their sensitive proprietary zero-day SecureROM exploits for A12/A13 devices (internally called “MSG”).

After he left, his new company published a detailed technical blog post in June 2026 called “Introducing usbliter8: An A12/A13 SecureROM Exploit”, which Magnet claims is essentially the same capability he worked on while at Magnet.

They’re alleging trade secret misappropriation, breach of contract, etc., and are seeking to have the post taken down along with damages.

If you don’t feel like reading all that basically an unpatchable exploit that affects the devices below is now out in the wild, magnet forensics super duper mad, apple is going to make forensic devices super duper useless eventually.

*A12 Bionic devices:*
- iPhone XS
- iPhone XS Max
- iPhone XR
- iPad Air (3rd generation)
- iPad mini (5th generation)
- iPad (8th generation)

*A13 Bionic devices:*
- iPhone 11
- iPhone 11 Pro
- iPhone 11 Pro Max
- iPhone SE (2nd generation)
- iPad (9th generation)

*A12X/Z devices: (theoretically possible)*
- iPad Pro 11" (1st gen)
- iPad Pro 12.9" (3rd gen)
- iPad Pro 11" (2nd gen)
- iPad Pro 12.9" (4th gen)

If you’re interested in reading the court docs, I’ve purchased them off PACER for you to read.
https://files.catbox.moe/7yjn47.zip

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Hardening modern iPhone against forensic tools
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What do you mean by this?

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apple stopped making hardware exploits easy after the iphone 12. everything shifted to software exploits. memory integrity enforcement and lockdown mode are definitely making things annoying for graykey and cellebrite. apple is winning the cat and mouse game for now.

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Any company making exploits to use against the public are scum, more of their employees should leave and report their “proprietary” exploits to get fixed.

Hope Magnet loses the lawsuit bigtime.

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the person behind public disclosure of the vulnerability affecting millions of people now started a cybersecurity company that offers legit services for securing devices instead of exploiting, no wonder they hate it.

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Don’t get too excited. They’re trying to compete with companies like greykey. Paradigm Shift

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Same:

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I’d be over the moon if Magnet loses and, frankly, loses their contracts.

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“which will cause Apple to seek to mitigate it.”

Lockdown mode: boy how do I tell you…

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