The theoretical iPhone virus has just gotten very real. Researchers Charles Miller and Collin Mulliner said the iPhone virus could be sent throught text messages. If your iPhone receives an SMS message with one character, turn off your iPhone immediately. On an infected iPhone, the sender of the virus takes total control remotely and can make calls, surf and send SMS through the infected iPhone.
“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone. Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”
The iPhone text virus is not a typical virus but a vulnerability in the iPhone OS. The hack is possible because of the way the iPhone does texting. There’s no word from Apple about a possible patch.
Miller and Mulliner demonstrated how to hijack the iPhone via texting to CNET. They said they have notified Apple six weeks ago…
For the attack to work, an attacker must send hundreds of SMS control messages, which are different from regular SMS messages, according to Miller. Only the initial SMS may be seen, he said.
Asked what an iPhone user can do when attacked, Miller replied: “Rebooting wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would stop all but the most sophisticated attacker. However, it doesn’t take but a second to grab all your personal info from the device, and as soon as you turn it back on, the bad guy could attack you again. That’s why I think this is so serious.”
[source]photo: cnet
July 30th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Why don’t we start using a Chinese method for dealing with hackers? We will simply
hack the hackers! That’s right, the first offense, hack off their right hand.
Second offense, hack off their left hand. After that, start removing other
protruberances on their bodies. Soon, they will get the message. STOP IT!
July 30th, 2009 at 10:02 am
Of course, we’ll have to take the initial backlash
which your threat will provoke. Hackers, initially, will be in a state of denial.
Then they’ll get angry (Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief) and attack with more creativity.
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