Technologizer is reporting on the developing story on SMS attacks coming out of today’s Black Hat Conference sessions. Seems like while the iPhone is grabbing a lot of attention, almost all GSM phones are said to be vulnerable. Basically, they get around the anti-spoofing security and send data designed to get access and take control of the phone.
On the iPhone specific side, however:
In a final coup for the conference, Lackey and Miras demonstrated an iPhone app they call TAFT which can, at the click of a few buttons, transmit various types of attacks against specific, vulnerable phone models, including iPhones, and phones running the Windows Mobile 5 and pre-”cupcake” Android operating systems.
Vendors, including Apple are working on patching the exploit, though there is still no word which specific models or firmware versions are vulnerable.
More as the story continues to develop.
UPDATE: Some folks are telling is that this is an iPhone 2.2.1 exploit already patched in 3.0. We’ll wait for an update from Black Hat before we exhale, however…
Almost a month ago we linked to an Engadget report on Charlie Miller and his SMS exploit for the iPhone. Well, today is the day he intends to show it off at the Black Hat conference.
Thanks to some last minute media attention, however, the general iPhone user base seems to be getting a tad nervous. And rightly so. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, in an ideal world, NSA expert come iHacker Charlie, who’s claim to current fame is using Mac exploits to win Pwn2own contests and free laptops, would work with companies like Apple and Microsoft (yes, it looks like Windows Mobile has an exploit as well), and those companies would patch the exploits as immediately as possible, before any “research” was publicly disclosed and any bad guys decided to use them as attack vectors.
TiPb will update post-Miller’s Black Hack disclosure, and hopefully Apple will roll the security fix into a quick 3.0.2 firmware release, or hurry 3.1 out of the gate.
In an ideal world, Mac and iPhone hacker Charlie Miller would discover vulnerabilities, inform Apple, and Apple would then patch them before they had any chance of being exploited “in the wild”.
Miller, however, prefers to keep them to himself so he can win MacBooks and detail them at Black Hat conferences. The good of the hacker obviously outweighs the good of the users, every one. So be it.
Miller’s latest iPhone-related find was disclosed at SyScan in Signapore:
a hole that would let attackers “run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator’s network in order 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.”
Apple, for their part, is hoping to have this patched before Miller’s upcoming Black Hat gig.
We hope so too.
[via Engadget. Thanks Travis for the tip!]
Macrumors is quoting Spiegel.dewww. as saying that both a new security flaw has been found in iPhone OS 2.1, and that a patch will be included in iPhone OS 2.2 due to drop… tomorrow?!
[A] newly announced iPhone vulnerability that can force a (potentially expensive) phone call to be made simply by visiting a webpage in Safari… SIT reports that they notified Apple of the issue a month ago and that a fix will become available on November 21st through a firmware upgrade.
We’ve already run down the other new features rumored to be included in 2.2, so now we just sit by iTunes, hit the Update button, and wait (unless you’ve jailbroken, then remember to steer clear!)
Last week the UK ruled that Apple was misrepresenting the iPhone’s provisioning of “just the internet” due to the lack of support for two ubiquitously popular 3rd party plugins: Flash and Java. We’ve previously covered the will they/won’t they drama surrounding development and deployment of Flash and Java pretty much ad nauseum infinitum, as well as some seldom discussed yet surprisingly frightening concerns about Flash and its downright sneaky use of 3rd party advertising cookies.
More recently, however, another issue has come to light. Primarily concerned with Windows Vista security and how it can be circumvented, this issue throws a renewed focus on the danger of 3rd party plugins like Flash and Java, on how they interpret and run code on our machines, and how they provide an increasingly popular attack vector for bad guys (hackers, malware authors, identity thieves, etc.)
How does this all relate to the iPhone, and what about ZOMG! Can has my Flash vidz? Read on to find out!
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