A federal judge has ordered a public iPhone exploit taken offline after Magnet Forensics argued it wasn’t independent security research at all, but instead a stolen trade secret.
Magnet Forensics (the company behind GrayKey) filed a lawsuit on July 7 against a former Exploit Engineer who worked with them and his new company (Paradigm Shift Technology). According to the complaint — as noted by Privacy Guides — the ex-employee had access to one of their sensitive proprietary zero-day SecureROM exploits for A12/A13 devices (internally called “MSG”).
After he left, his new company published a detailed technical blog post in June 2026 called “Introducing usbliter8: An A12/A13 SecureROM Exploit”, which Magnet claims is essentially the same capability he worked on while at Magnet.
Magnet Forensics alleging trade secret misappropriation, breach of contract, etc., and are seeking to have the post taken down along with damages.
Now U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert partially approved Magnet’s request for a preliminary injunction. She directed Paradigm Shift and former Magnet exploit engineer Mario Del Gaudio to delete the usbliter8 article, code, technical details, and related materials in their possession by 11:59 p.m. Eastern on July 23.
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