I’d like to suggest a fun project for Apple that might allow them to kill off this NSO malware: Apple should devote a few engineers to create honeypot iPhones that they could get into the hands of a few carefully chosen journalists and dissidents who would then “lose” their phones or allow the phones to be confiscated by governments or organizations who use NSO software. The objective is to get a copy of the NSO malware and figure out the exploit(s) they use.

The honeypot phones would behave exactly like normal phones but save all incoming data at the lowest protocol layer (whether by wifi, cellular, Lightning connector, and maybe even in-circuit attempts to reflash firmware) to hidden internal terabyte microSD storage, which it would later exfiltrate back to Apple at some point —- perhaps by even having a second hidden cellular connection. I’m assuming that Apple has all the talent it needs to reverse engineer and plug the NSO malware once it has an actual copy of the malware.