Two researchers have found an iPhone bug that could infect phones virally via SMS. They plan to reveal the still unpatched iPhone bug at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Thursday. If you receive a text message with a single square character, you are advised to immediately turn off your iPhone, as they warn it means that someone has utilized the bug to take over your iPhone.
“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” said cybersecurity researcher Charles Miller. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”
The two found the bug in how the iPhone handles text messages. Once in control, the hacker has complete control over your iPhone, allowing them to make calls, visit websites, turn on the camera and more importantly they can send the bug via SMS.
Well over a month ago, they have reached out to Apple, but have not heard back.
Charles Miller isn’t new at finding security flaws in the iPhone. Back in 2007, Miller found a bug that allowed someone to remotely hijack the iPhone via the browser.
It’s not clear if Apple has included a fix in iPhone OS 3.1, which recently entered beta 3 stage, so will not be ready by Thursday.
Be careful out there and perhaps we’ll have more information come Thursday on a possible fix from Apple.
[via Forbes]
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Hypothetically speaking, say we get one of these square text messages, and we turn our phone off, then what do we do?
ok…………so we turn our iphone off. Then what? If we receive the message, will we be able turn our phone right back on, or download a fix? Will be interesting to see what we have to do.
Both of you share my exact question. There are no instructions on what to do next. Do we keep it off until 3.1 is released?
They didn’t offer any insight on next steps. We’ll be tracking the conference and update the site accordingly should we get more info.
wait a few minutes…
then turn it back on.
repeat as needed…
thanks apple…
[/sarcasm]
This is scary… there is actually no way of stopping it. There will be a lot of paranoid people out there…