pbonaol wrote:
This, and more happened (and still happening) to me. My family members came under cyber attack and the phones had been cloned. Changed SIM card, no changes. Antivirus, did nothing. My photos were edited as soon as I took them. Web page redirects, passwords being changed, my wife had an android, yet in my contacts calling her on FaceTime was available. Apple support said “impossible”, so I’d have them screen share to be show them. I went up through the support tier levels to level 5 then was told I had to have the phone erased and system reinstalled, not reset. Then I tried to FaceTime her and some answered her number on (I assume) an IPhone. Then a warning on my phone “installing a custom system can render the phone inoperable”. Tried 5 burner phones, no help so I just luse the phone and et it happen.
This is an entirely different issue from the original post—the original post was seemingly faulty iPhone hardware.
Here, factory reset and complete password change (to new and unique passwords), including carrier PIN and Wi-Fi, everything, would be the usual and correct path, too.
Password re-use is doom, these days. Working through the list of Apple list of password-related Security Recommendations (Settings > Passwords > Security Recommendations) can help avoid password messes. (But the breach reported here is seemingly larger.)
Antivirus cannot “scan” an iPhone. Best it can do is collect your network traffic for scanning, for logging, and—if the vendor is inclined to profit from the access provided and as some anti-virus developers have decided to do—collection and resale of your traffic. Add-on first-few-hops VPN clients tend to provide much less security than presumed too, and with much higher risk of having your traffic scanned, logged, re-packaged, and sold.
Apple Support can load diagnostics remotely. As for what that message akin to “Custom OS can cause critical problems” error might be, I don’t recognize that message in the context of iPhones. That error message is very similar to a common message shown on Android phones, though.
If an iPhone among six different phones have all shown evidence of breaches, you’re either a priority target for a very well-funded adversary, or there’s likely something else going on.
Here is what Apple recommends doing: https://help.apple.com/pdf/personal-safety/en_US/personal-safety-user-guide.pdf