(image from nathanborror on Flickr)
Writing about the iPhone is becoming a worrying habit on here, but what can I say? I like technology, and the way some things have been done with the iPhone keep catching my attention. This latest one’s a wee bit more serious than most of the stuff though.
Black Hat is this week. Black Hat is a nice big conference where a lot of people who fall on either side of the fence when it comes to IT security get together. The people who help stop people getting into systems, and the the people who like to get into systems.
Given that, what do you think a company should do if someone gives them a month’s notice that they’re going to reveal an exploit that allows remote control of their product?
The answer from Apple seems to be ‘not patch it beforehand’. The end of that month’s notice, and Charlie Miller’s talk at Black Hat are today. Might be worth turning your phone off for a bit until people know what the score is. This spreads by seemingly blank text.
According to the feature at Forbes, the exploit allows the hacker access over pretty much anything to do with the phone. Turning the microphone on and listening in, accessing the address book, making calls, spreading itself via texts, checking for information stored on the phone, hitting certain websites, etc, etc, etc. There’s any number of ways that this could be exploited financially – from direct revenue via premium rate texts and numbers to looking for credit card details or banking passwords that people have kept on the phone. In terms of ways it could be exploited by people just looking to cause havoc… Take your pick.
Think this is just hype? Elinor Mills at CNet met the researchers involved, and they demonstrated the hack in the wild.
Here’s what happened: While I was talking on the phone to Charlie Miller, his partner, Collin Mulliner, sent me a text message from his phone. One minute I’m talking to Miller and the next minute my phone is dead, and this time it’s not AT&T’s fault. After a few seconds it came back to life, but I was not able to make or receive calls until I rebooted.
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.