cryptbe

Cool to see our work here. I'm Thai, and I run Calif. Happy to answer any questions.

We'll publish the technical details of these hacks over the coming weeks. Writing these articles takes time, and we've been busy with a PHP thing [1].

In the meantime, check out The Great Glyph Grift [2] for a glimpse of what can go wrong when iOS parses PDFs.

Just in case you wonder, we've disclosed most of the bugs in these exploit chains to Apple and will disclose the rest. So far in 2026, we've reported close to 100 bugs to Apple. We don't accept Apple bounties, and we're not being paid for this work. We don't sell bugs or exploits, and we have no sponsors funding this research.

We do this because it's fun, intellectually challenging, and we want to help make the iPhone safer. We also have a business to run, so we do need some marketing points.

[1] https://calif.io/php2shell

[2] https://calif.io/research/the-great-glyph-grift

Check out https://calif.io/research/the-great-glyph-grift, which shows one could go wrong with PDF in iOS.

We're gonna publish more in the coming weeks. Writing these blog posts take time, and we've been busy with another PHP thing.

We disclosed most bugs to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest. We've disclosed probably close to 100 bugs to Apple in the past 6 months.

We've also been working with closely with the Signal Foundation to help them reduce the attack surface.

It's not true that we don't want to make devices more secure. We do and it's why we do this research.

We also do want our name out there because we're having a lot of fun and want to share that with our friends and the rest of the world.

Thanks Tom! You're always super kind to us.

We disclosed most of the bugs used in these chains to Apple, and are going to disclose the rest, if not already.

>Just as a reminder for some folks here: During their WeWorm research in July–September 2026, Calif didn't stop at proving RCE to Tencent—they spent an extra week using AI to build a fully functional, self-propagating zero-click worm across three live phones, triggering temporary account bans from Tencent during testing.

Not sure what exactly your point is. The WeWorm demo was done in a controlled environment.

Also we do this for free. We don't charge neither Tencent nor Apple. We don't even take their bounties. Why can't we have some fun?

If you're so upset about how we do it, my suggestion is go find your own bugs.

Oh hey, this is our work! We helped Anthropic analyze and report this bug.

For the record, this bug has nothing to do with our recent MIE attack [1] [2], which exploited two different kernel bugs. Our bugs are not fixed yet.

[1] https://blog.calif.io/p/first-public-kernel-memory-corruptio...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48139219

Nope. Try the PoC on macOS:

https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/fr...

The script downloads and sets up FreeBSD on QEMU, then runs the exploit.

The exploit is very smart: https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/fr.... It basically backdoors sshd.

You're always super kind to me :)

Nice to randomly encounter our own work here.

Check out our blog post for a fun walkthrough: https://blog.calif.io/p/cve-2026-7270-how-i-get-root-on-free...

AI-generated working exploit, write-up and prompts: https://github.com/califio/publications/tree/main/MADBugs/fr...

The feature is enabled by default. You can test it by yourself.

This is a good title, thanks! There was iTerm2 in the original title, but it overflowed to the subtitle in Substack.

I've now updated the blog post.

Disclosure: I didn't discover the vulnerability. I wrote the blog post.

Thanks for releasing a fix!

It was surprising that there wasn't an official release, even though the bug impacts otherwise routine, harmless workflows. The patch itself [1] framed the issue as "hypothetical," so the goal of the blog post was to demonstrate that it is not. I'm glad that you've agreed to release a fix.

[1] https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/commit/a9e745993c2e2cbb30...