Exploited Device and Trust Certificates

Proving a negative is impossible.

Wipe and reset and reload and resume, or contact a firm that specializes in mobile forensics and related investigations.

Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to factory settings - Apple Support

If you’re a target for shenanigans (investigative journalist, senior in government or business, have access to sensitive or classified data, dissident, etc), get help specifically tailored to better managing your electronics and your data.

Here is a reasonable (non-political) list of security suggestions: https://democrats.org/security/

If you have all that in place, have gone through the security recommendations provided by Apple, have two-factor authentication enabled on all sensitive accounts, passwords unique and robust, and your data reliably backed up in one or more places, then forensics and certificates might get interesting, and gaining the commensurate knowledge about macOS and iOS and iPadOS internals and malware and implants.

And if somebody is messing with the trust store without your knowledge and particularly if that is surviving past a reset and restore, you’re deeply hosed.

That you’re seemingly posting personal information here should mean some introspection around your own information management practices, too.

Wholesale replacement? Interesting approach. Costly. Can be useful for persistent exploits, but whether that was or is the case here is entirely unclear. Probably not all that cost-effective for most of us, and still problematic unless and until the underlying vulnerability—whatever that might be, and if there is one here—is addressed, either.

Reset and reload and upgrading security would be a more typical initial response.

Some introspection around your own value as a potential target is warranted, too.

Put differently, posting variations of “am I hacked?” is probably not going to succeed, absent a flagrant hack.

Direct forensics-level access into the systems purportedly exploited is where this is headed, and that’s not cheap..

RottenApple_User wrote: "...I've attached an example of what I mean by "corrupted" Apple apps. The screen shot is taken immediately after the factory restore..."

Your screenshot shows the normal, uncorrupted result of this sequence of taps:

Settings > Shortcuts > Advanced

...Is that what you did? By the way, here's my identical, normal screenshot:

And Apple's Shortcuts app is very useful, particularly for creating your own custom shortcuts:

Shortcuts User Guide for iPhone and iPad

õ¿õ¬

Nothing in that image of Shortcuts app settings is unusual or unexpected or “corrupted”. Those are the default settings, too.

Here’s the local version of that same settings page here:

iOS has a few latent tools and features that are masked until enabled, and that might be what you are referencing as a “corruption”. As examples, CarPlay is mostly hidden until used, and there are some development-related tools that are also latent until enabled. The Apple Shortcuts app is handy, too. Shortcuts is this app:

And the trust store is an ongoing and evolving database, and not an immutable configuration.

If you were not seeking to show the lighter-colored areas in the included image, here is how to take a screen shot: Take a screenshot on your iPhone - Apple Support

If you are referring to the lighter-colored areas as the “corruption”, that is unrelated to the trust store and Shortcuts app settings and the rest, and might possibly be a reflection, but looks rather like display damage. Whether the display was over-compressed, or something was dragged over the display too firmly, or some other issue, or maybe it’s a manufacturing defect, Apple would have to decide.