How to hijack 'every iPhone in the world'

Ha! I feel better about not getting an iPhone now.<blockquote>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.</blockquote>http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/28/hackers-iphone-apple-technology-security-hackers.html

Miller and Mulliner notified Apple about this over a month ago but Apple hasn't (yet) patched the bug.

 

Pass.

I'll continue to steal bad music, though.

 

My graphic designer is one of those radical, Stepford-Wife Apple enthusiasts.
He says this is not that big of a deal, although there might be some vulnerability for first-generation and jail-broken iPhones.

 

Oh crap! It's Lawnmower Man's plan come to fruition!



I haven't seen that movie in a while. It's a safe guess the CGI, or what passed for it in '91 or so, is very laughable.

 

Or, apparently pretty much any other phone:

"The iPhone SMS bug is just one of a series that the researchers plan to reveal in their talk. They say they've also found a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile that allows complete remote control of Microsoft-based devices. Another pair of SMS bugs in the iPhone and Google's Android phones would purportedly allow a hacker to knock a phone off its wireless network for about 10 seconds with a series of text messages."

Not an Apple problem, but it grabs the headline.

 

If only we could find a way to slip 'Twitter' into every headline. Kids really respond to that.

 

"Senate twitters with debate over health care reform"

 

'Crippling iPhone SMS bug now available on Twitter'

No one could resist reading that story. Can you smell record rack sales?

 

Sadly, no one who would buy a paper off a rack would have any idea what that means.

 

Rack?



[/crossthreading]

 

People will buy papers off that rack even if they can't read.

 

Holy shit, a Lawnmower Man reference. That was actually a DOS-based video game, too, and fairly complicated.