Someone rooted my ipad

No one did any such thing. It's nearly impossible. Where it can be done is extremely expensive. Like a minimum of six figures to directly access ONE device. Do you have anything on your iPad worth that much money to someone?

If not, explain what's happening rather than making assumptions and wild guesses.

For this kind of thing, we're talking nation-state produced software. Pegasus, created by Israel's NSO group, was one such exploit. Maybe still is.

The New York Times reported in 2016 that the NSO Group charged customers $500,000 just to install the software and $650,000 to get into 10 devices. The report also said that infiltrating 10 Android devices would cost an agency $650,000 and the same cost would apply for 10 iPhone gadgets. Getting into Blackberry devices would cost an agency $500,000 and $300,000 for Symbian users.

According to the report, extra targets would increase the cost further. Moreover, the company also charged an annual maintenance fee of 17 per cent of the total price.

So, it is possible to directly hack an iOS device, but the cost is exorbitant. No one is going to spend that kind of money to hack a device just to get pictures of someone's dog, or bank account info with under a million dollars in it.

A zero-click remote command execution exploit with persistence was worth between one and two million dollars, maybe more, when last I checked.

As for the original question…

If the OP is being targeted by mercenary tools, they’re probably going to need more help with their security than can reasonably be provided around here. Investigative journalists, political dissidents, senior in government or private organizations, with access to great wealth, or to sensitive or classified or military or financial data, these and other similar folks can be targeted, based on available reports.

Or if this might be so-called ghost touches or missed touches for another example of a problem sometimes conflated with security exploits, the OP is better resolved with a hardware repair or replacement.

Which is why more information on the issue was (correctly) requested by posters above.

You are going to need to provide a lot more information than that and possibly screenshots of what you see as well.

If someone had physical access to your iPad with your credentials and had enough time to jailbreak the device, then you will need to perform a Factory Reset and you will not be able to restore from a backup. That does mean you will lose all data on your iPad.

Kurt Lang wrote:

No one did any such thing. It's nearly impossible. Where it can be done is extremely expensive. Like a minimum of six figures to directly access ONE device. Do you have anything on your iPad worth that much money to someone?

If not, explain what's happening rather than making assumptions and wild guesses.

Now, I learned something… thanks!

A zero-click remote command execution exploit with persistence was worth between one and two million dollars, maybe more, when last I checked.

Not surprised at all the cost of such exploits have gone way up as Apple keeps making it harder to get past their defenses.

Or that. 🙂