This gets me to ask whether I have been hacked . For a few weeks now, both my main mbp and iPhone have been showing unexpected hangs of 1-30 seconds. I can’t find out what’s causing it - not memory pressure, not cpu load.
I am worried that the sluggishness appeared about the same time on both devices
For ios, rebooting your phone is extremely effective at removing exploits. The boot chain attestation stuff can verify the system is in a known state. If you are ultra paranoid you could enable lockdown mode which preemptively disables the entrypoints for exploits. So far I don't believe there has been any exploit which works with lockdown mode enabled.
If you are already exploited though, I doubt it helps
Getting persistent root is actually quite difficult on mobile operating systems. iOS famously so, but unless you're running a custom ROM other than Graphene, Android has some solid protections as well.
Regular phone reboots are a security measure at this point.
It does though, the exploit exists in memory. When you reboot the phone the memory is reset, if it's modified system files, the checksums won't pass and your phone will refuse to boot. Requiring it to be wiped and reinstalled.
These days most exploits can not persist through a reboot due to secureboot and other bootchain attestations. In the boot process, everything loaded gets checksummed and compared to signed signatures from Apple, but this only helps at load time, not while the phone is running. Of course if the phone is not patched, the exploit could be reloaded, but this would require revising a malicious website or reopening a malicious bit of media.