Bitsight, a cybersecurity ratings company, publishes research on botnets, exposed devices, DDoS attacks, vulnerabilities and security incidents.
HN commenters link it as source material for incident analyses, including the Mylobot botnet, a DDoS attack investigation and an ad fraud operation.
This image at https://www.bitsight.com/sites/default/files/2024/07/23/Unique%20IPs%20hourly%20avergae.png makes a compelling argument that something happened concurrently with the third set of weekday peaks. Although considering how similar each peak was for the first two weeks I would say the divergence was earlier than the dotted line where the short sharp peak appeared.
Something happened, the nature of that something might be unrelated to the BSOD crash. Could just be another piece of software doing an update at a different frequency that sometimes changes the timing of the crowdstrike update.
You'd need a longer term view of data searching for beat patterns to detect that.
If the something was a one-off effect, like admins taking sick days to watch the Euro final, I'm not sure how you could positively identify the cause.
That question seems like it has to be framed in a misunderstanding of how secure you believe the iOS platform is. Here's a list of CVEs for iOS just this year: https://www.bitsight.com/blog/apple-vulnerabilities-cisa-known-exploited-vulnerabilities
If you went back farther, you would find exploits that compromise your iOS device simply by receiving a compromised jpg image, not even by you opening the message. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/apple-patches-clickless-0-day-image-processing-vulnerability-in-ios-macos/
I think the expectation in 2024 should simply be 0 day exploits are available for purchase that target both platforms, neither is secure.
IIRC the mylobot botnet is responsible for providing the vast majority of residential (home) IP addresses for residential VPN providers (who are then sold to expressvpn/nordvpn). The whole business is incredibly shady and nefarious and nordvpn/expressvpn must know from whom they contract their residential vpn services from.
BHProxies is the largest residential proxy provider on the internet and almost all of their proxies are acquired through the botnet above.
https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-botnet
Krebs' blog is nice, but quite often it's just re-reporting stuff from somewhere else:
Original with more details: https://www.bitsight.com/blog/fuyao-enterprise-building-ad-fraud-empire-ai-and-kids-coding-blocks
So it seems neither traffic came from Ukraine nor Dark Storm was probably behind the attack. The plot thickens!
https://www.bitsight.com/blog/massive-ddos-cyber-fog
Direct link to the Bitsight report:
https://www.bitsight.com/press-releases/bitsight-discovers-critical-vulnerabilities-widely-used-vehicle-gps-tracker