There are reports that a group has been able to hack into the Apple iPhone by using a simple txt message.
If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.
The pair have reported the hole to Apple but as of yet no response.
So how safe is the iPhone?
Apparently with this claimed breach you can get into a users iPhone to surf the web, make calls, send messages and even take pictures.
If this is real, it could be a more severe vulnerability than any other ever seen.
Charlie Miller, a security researcher, discovered the hack a month ago and contacted Apple, but the company has yet to release a software update fixing the security hole. Miller and fellow researcher Collin Mulliner will make the exploit public at today’s Black Hat Cyber Security Conference in Las Vegas, where hosts and attendees exchange information on Internet threats.
Dai Zovi, who is the co-author of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook,” said that once hackers start to put substantial resources into targeting Apple’s computers, they will be at least as vulnerable as Windows machines, according to Reuters.
“There is no magic fairy dust protecting Macs,” he said.
Miller, co-author of “The Mac Hacker’s Handbook,” said that the Mac OS will be easier to crack than Windows as it is bigger and less concisely written. This means that there is more room for vulnerabilities and bugs.
This hack arrives to an unsuspecting iPhone user as an SMS with a single character which could allow the hacker to do the following:
– Make calls from your iPhone
– Steal your personal data stored on your iPhone
– Send Text Messages from your smartphone, and…
– simply take over your phone making it useless…for you.
Researchers Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller shortly before they proved they could attack my iPhone with a text message, even after a beer or two.
(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET News)
The attack is enabled by a serious memory corruption bug in the way the iPhone handles SMS messages, said Miller, a senior security researcher at Independent Security Evaluators. There is no patch, despite the fact that Apple was notified of the problem about six weeks ago, he said.
How to hack the iphone with a txt message
