Hackers competing in the Pwn2Own contest have found a way to recover deleted iPhone photos. The team—Fluoroacetate—was crowned Master of Pwn with 45 points.
[People Can Buy Apple Hacking Tools on the Dark Web]
Deleted iPhone Photos
During their demo the team recovered a photo from an iPhone’s Recently Deleted section. Users can go into this section of Photos to see photos they have deleted, and also recover them. But it’s not accessible to third-parties, or at least it shouldn’t be. The team used certain Safari exploits to trick iOS into letting them access these deleted photos. This earned them a reward of US$50,000.
I wouldn’t worry too much about this though. Not only will Apple patch this, but it only works on photos in Recently Deleted. Once a photo is deleted from there, it’s unrecoverable.