OMG! Everybody panic!
It’s bad enough that the iPhone can, according to Apple itself, be used to crash cell towers, but apparently they can be very easily hijacked, too:
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.
That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they’ve found in the iPhone’s handling of text messages, the researchers say they’ll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone’s functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device’s camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.
The researchers say they’ve notified Apple about the vulnerability, but that Apple had not provided a fix.
Everybody sing: “It’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it . . .”
Update, 31 July: Apple has announced that it will be releasing a fix to this problem on August 1st.
Update, the second, 31 July: The folks on the Apple-iPhone mailing list say the fix has escaped and is now available through iTunes. I’ll be downloading the update as soon as I get home . . .
