iVerify’s report Tuesday adds to evidence of spyware’s increasingly indiscriminate targeting.

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There’s mounting evidence of spyware attacks growing more indiscriminate, leading to more everyday citizens being hit as opposed to traditionally “high-value” targets.

The AdFection spyware attacks, which could infect anyone visiting a website that had advertising on it, represented the most recent revelation. And iVerify published a report Tuesday analyzing customer infections and threat notifications from Apple that contributes to the trend. 

“Conventional guidance on spyware risk focused on people with a public profile, a sensitive job or a role that put them on a government’s radar,” the company said. “Some Apple Threat Notification cases iVerify saw this year don’t fit that pattern.”

“In Ottawa, Apple Threat Notifications reached the children of a city bus driver and a stay-at-home mom,” it continued. “In Australia, one went to a limousine driver. None of them had a public profile, a sensitive job or an obvious connection to anyone worth spying on. These cases matter because they show the threat reaching people who had no reason to expect it.  For an enterprise, the employees most likely to be hit look much more like the limousine driver than like the CEO.”

Part of that is that when spyware attacks are less targeted, they might be more likely to hit those who aren’t as diligently focused on routine cyber hygiene, as opposed to CEOs who are probably regularly upgrading their defenses, iVerify told CyberScoop.

Rocky Cole, co-founder of the company, said the change reflects a shift in who’s using spyware.

“The vast majority of our detections were mass attacks by criminal groups looking to do purely criminal things,” Cole said. “For the purposes of stealing credentials and selling them on the black market, an executive credential is not necessarily more valuable than a system administrator or even an average employee.”

iVerify’s report looked at other trends as well. Among the findings:

• iVerify didn’t see any devices that were infected by the DarkSword or Coruna iOS exploit kits where users received Apple threat notifications, suggesting that the tech giant might be overly focused on nation-state threats and well-known commercial mercenary spyware like NSO Group’s Pegasus.





• The rate of spyware infections held relatively steady in 2026, at 1.07 infections per 1,000 iOS consumer scans.





• “Three in four of this year’s detections were criminal adversaries stealing credentials and cryptocurrency, not state-sponsored actors,” the report said.

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Source: CyberScoop
Source Link: https://cyberscoop.com/spyware-attacks-trend-everyday-people-iverify-report/