Most marvel at the possibilities and features of the iPhone as a whole and also the newly released iPhone 3GS, but could this amazing Apple cellphone possibly be an easy device to hack into and take over?
Seems that Apple has a slight, but extremely dangerous flaw, in the iPhone Security foundation which could allow hackers to take over your iPhone. This iPhone security breach has been proven by and tested at the Black Hat Security Conference where Charlie Miller and Colin Mulliner illustrated the ease of the hack and just hinted at the ramifications for iPhone owners.
This hack arrives to an unsuspecting iPhone user as an SMS with a single square 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.
Even scarier is the ability for this hack or iPhone bug to spread like a virus. When the hacker takes over your iPhone, they could easily send this sms to your entire address book, hence sending an iPhone virus to duplicate its malicious take over.
This iPhone bug is demonstrated by a corruption bug in the SMS application of the iPhone. Unfortunately, as of now, Apple has not provided a patch to repair this tremendous flaw, even though they have known about it for 6 weeks.
Google Android showed a similar bug previously as well, but a successful patch was provided within 24 hours, making Google fans relax easier than Apple fans.
Knowing of this crazy iPhone virus development, one could only wait and hope for a quick and dependable patch to be officially released. In the meantime, if such an SMS arrives to you with one single character…immediately turn off your iPhone, in hopes that you avoided the takeover.
Update: Apple has released the iPhone OS 3.0.1 with a patch to solve the iPhone virus and SMS hack problem.
