One of the geniuses working for Google on Project Zero wrote on his blogpost and on his YouTube videos:

Introduction

Quoting @halvarflake's Offensivecon keynote from February 2020:

"Exploits are the closest thing to "magic spells" we experience in the real world: Construct the right incantation, gain remote control over device."

For 6 months of 2020, while locked down in the corner of my bedroom surrounded by my lovely, screaming children, I've been working on a magic spell of my own. No, sadly not an incantation to convince the kids to sleep in until 9am every morning, but instead a wormable radio-proximity exploit which allows me to gain complete control over any iPhone in my vicinity. View all the photos, read all the email, copy all the private messages and monitor everything which happens on there in real-time.

The takeaway from this project should not be: no one will spend six months of their life just to hack my phone, I'm fine.

Instead, it should be: one person, working alone in their bedroom, was able to build a capability which would allow them to seriously compromise iPhone users they'd come into close contact with.

Imagine the sense of power an attacker with such a capability must feel. As we all pour more and more of our souls into these devices, an attacker can gain a treasure trove of information on an unsuspecting target.

What's more, with directional antennas, higher transmission powers and sensitive receivers the range of such attacks can be considerable.

I have no evidence that these issues were exploited in the wild; I found them myself through manual reverse engineering. But we do know that exploit vendors seemed to take notice of these fixes. For example, take this tweet from Mark Dowd, the co-founder of Azimuth Security, an Australian "market-leading information security business":

Watch the videos and read his full post here.