Please tell me that the vulnerability is due to government surveilance backdoors
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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It appears to be related to exploit code that was sold by a US contractor to a Russian group; the exploits it uses are all patched on recent OS versions, but older versions of iOS 17 and 18 are vulnerable.
So cool that Apple stopped making iOS 18 updates for all devices above iPhone XR. /s Forcing users on 11/12/13/14/15/16/17 devices to choose either staying on the more stable 18.7.2 where they were comfortable, or the garbage can of iOS 26. They fixed the DarkSword issue on the XR and select iPads with a 18.8 patch, but refuse to release it for anyone still on 18.7.2, on any device that’s iOS 26 compatible.
You’re being downvoted, but you’re correct. Apple is probably risking a lawsuit by not shipping an already available security update for all users of iOS 18.
So cool Apple stopped making iOS 2 updates for all devices above iPhone 3G. /s Forcing users on iPhone 1 to choose either staying on the more stable 2.2.1 where they were comfortable, or the garbage can of iOS 3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10/11/12/13/14/15/16/17/18/26.
Ummm, it wasn’t me this time, I swear
You sure know what news you wanna hear 😄
Its been news before, so there is precedence for that possibility.
Aww where's the link? I have an old iPhone that my ex-employeer didn't want back - I wouldn't mind playing around with it.
Had to use duckduckgo to find it, but just "darksword site:github.com" worked. It's not showing up in Google results.
https://github.com/htimesnine/DarkSword-RCE
There's also an implementation in objc: https://github.com/opa334/darksword-kexploit
FYI, you can just use !git or !gh with duckduckgo to focus on github
(But interesting that Google's filtering results...)