Amazing apple let this slip past. Seems pretty obvious why this is bad design, easy to exploit, etc. so maybe it was intentional and already being used by us when the NSO group caught wind through “back channels” and hopped on the gravy train.
"iMessage's .gif handling was a bit sloppy" is a believable problem; the idea that it was done deliberately to facilitate access to what amounts to a VM running in an old image compression format is a big stretch.
This isn't like goto fail, and even that one could be explained by developer oversight.
I mean the actual exploit is in decades old xpdf code, so that seems unlikely? The gif thing is simply the way that they get to the xpdf JBIG2 decoder.
