Apple has released iOS 26.4.2 to address a security flaw that allowed law enforcement to recover deleted messages from an iPhone's notification database. The vulnerability was highlighted in recent court testimony where the FBI was able to extract previews of incoming messages from the Signal app, even after the app and its messages had been deleted by the user.
The issue was not with the encryption of apps like Signal, but rather how iOS stored notification content. If a user had message previews enabled for their lock screen, the iPhone's internal notification storage retained this data. The new update ensures that deleted notifications cannot be retrieved by forensic tools, closing the privacy gap.