Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Fri 3rd Jul 2009 21:23 UTC
There haven't been too many iPhone exploits, it seems, despite the popularity of said devices. However, Charlie Miller, a security researcher, recently uncovered a vulnerability in the iPhone OS that could possibly "allow an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network. The malicious code could include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet." Scary, isn't it? They say it's not very likely that others will exploit it even on a small scale before Apple issues the patch, but having a hole like that just sitting there makes me glad right now that I don't own an iPhone.
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Member since:2006-01-01
I truly doubt the intent is to bad-mouth Apple or to disqualify Apple as a good product company. The intent is to inform users and make them aware and nothing else and let me not remind you that if this was MS' Windows OS, this (or may be other site) thread would have been flooded with comments about how "bad" MS is.
Member since:
2006-06-09
Yeah it's unfortunate that people never realize this.
People think, like this OSNews editor (no harm intended btw), that their computer/phone/whatever is secure because theres no big announcement saying "omg here's a vulnerability".
But if in 2 years someone releases one, it means your computer/phone/whatever has been open to this hole for 2 years.
And most likely, yours does have them. Mine too. Everyone's in fact. We just hope as few as possible, and the product to be either as used as possible, so people actually find issues and fix them (iphone) or not very well known so no one take the time to research them.
But trust me, for webos, symbian, etc, there's a lot of "known" exploits that didnt make it to the medias/vendors/etc and make your phone vulnerable. due to jailbreaking stuff the iphone gets quite a lot of review actually, which is a good thing. (yet light years from "very good", but better than some)