Apple’s Lockdown Mode Aims to Counter Spyware Threats

The surveillance-for-hire Industry has emerged in recent years as a very real threat to activists, dissidents, journalists, and human rights defenders around the world, as vendors offer increasingly invasive and effective spyware to governments. The most sophisticated of these tools, like NSO Group's notorious Pegasus spyware, target victims' smartphones using rare and sophisticated exploits to compromise Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems. As the situation has deteriorated for victims, activists and security experts have increasingly called for more drastic measures to protect vulnerable individuals. Now Apple has an option.

Today, Apple is announcing a new feature for its upcoming iOS 16 release called Lockdown Mode. Apple emphasizes that the feature was created for a small subset of users who are at high risk of government targeting, and it doesn't expect the feature to be widely adopted. But for those who want to use it, the feature is an alternate mode of iOS that heavily restricts the tools and services that spyware actors target to take control of victims' devices.

“This is an unprecedented step for user security for high-risk users,” Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab said on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “I believe that this will throw a wrench into their modus operandi. I expect [spyware vendors] to try to evolve, but hopefully, this feature will prevent some of those harms from happening down the road.”