iPhone SMS Virus

An iPhone hacker Charlie Miller will release the world’s first iPhone virus today. He discovered an SMS hack 6 weeks ago and reported it to Apple, but Apple has yet to release a patch. Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner will both explain and reveal their iPhone SMS exploit some time today at the Blackhat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.

iPhone SMS hack details

How does the SMS hack work? Firstly, this hack does not requirreleae the victim to download any file. The attacker only needs to know the victim’s phone number. Miller says the attack is enabled by a serious memory corruption in the way the iPhone handles SMS messages. For the attack to work, an attacker must send hundreds of SMS control messages (different from regular SMS messages) and only the initial SMS will be seen. This attack works on both the iPhone and the Andoid. What does the iPhone SMS hack do? This hack can allow the attacker to make calls from your iPhone, steal your data, send text messages, and also spread the attack to other iPhones in your address book.

How to recognize and avoid the iPhone virus

If you get a strange text message containing any square box, even if it’s from a recognized number you may be the victim of the iPhone virus.

You have two choices:

1. Put your iPhone in Airplane mode: Go to Settings -> Airplane Mode and slide the button to Off.
2. Hold down the power button, and slide to turn your iPhone off.

The only thing we can do now is wait for Apple to release a patch. We expect Apple to release the iPhone 3.1 update by September, but hopefully this exploit causes them to release it earlier. iPhone Forensics expert, Jonathan Zdziarski and iPhone hacker p0sixninja from the Chonic Dev Team recently tweeted about the possibility to release their own patch for this vulnerability (only available through a jailbreak). I’m hoping Chronic Dev Team will be able to release a fix for this as this will show Apple that they are wrong about the jailbreaking community. Apple dislikes jailbreaking and is trying to make it illegal. Will the Chronic Dev Team release a patch first or will Apple? We will keep you updated on this and also post a guide on how to patch once a patch is released! Subscribe to our RSS feed or bookmark this post for updates. Do you think it’s vey irresponsible for Apple to not have released a patch yet?