Hackers claim popular iPhones a target
Hackers say one text message is all it takes to gain control of the device.
Teresa Smith, Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, July 30, 2009Canadian iPhone users may want to think about hanging up for a while if two hacker heavyweights prove they can infiltrate the system and put a worm inside the Apple.
Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner say they've found a security-weakness in Apple's iPhone which would allow a hacker to gain control of the device by sending one single SMS - or text message - and they're giving a how-to talk Thursday at the 2009 Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
The new iPhone 3Gs is displayed at an Apple store June 19, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Hackers say they've found a security-weakness in Apple's iPhone which would allow a hacker to gain control of the device by sending one single SMS — or text message — and they're giving a how-to talk Thursday at the 2009 Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
Justin Sullivan
Once the technique is made public, it won't be long before it ends up going viral on YouTube and hacker message boards around the globe.
Miller, one of the top computer hackers in the U.S. and Mulliner, a PhD student at Technical University of Berlin, focusing on the security of mobile devices, say they found the vulnerability in June and alerted Apple to the problem, but the computer giant hasn't come out with any official statement or a security update to combat the problem. Apple didn't immediately return calls to Canwest News Service Thursday.
Canadian Tech-guru, Jesse Hirsh says if the hackers have cracked the code there is little iPhone users can do, for now.
Almost every mobile-phone user, worldwide, uses text-messaging daily, if not hourly, so Canada's iPhone users are just as vulnerable as those in the rest of the world, said Hirsh.
He said users should think of the iPhone as a computer, which is vulnerable to hacking.
"In this case, just like how a computer can be infected by an e-mail, they're using an SMS message, not so much to infect it, but to open up a back door that then allows them to control the computer and do whatever they want with it," said Hirsh.
He said the hackers would be able to use the iPhone just as its owner would - they could send e-mails (or spam), text messages, surf the Internet and make phone calls. He warned that criminals could access a user's personal banking information if they have saved passwords into their iPhone.
Hirsh explained that the technology could also be used on a wider scale, by accessing an entire network, finding out all the iPhone numbers and sending an automatic, viral SMS to every single number. The phones would then respond, and the hacker would have control of, potentially, at least a few thousand phones, said Hirsh.
There's not much iPhone users can do aside from putting their phone away until Apple comes up with a solution, said Hirsh.
"It's Apple's job to fix this, not the individual user," he said.
Hirsh says this incident demonstrates that all technology, at some point, is fundamentally insecure and today, it's Apple's turn to squirm.
He's confident Apple will find a solution, but said another hacker will come along soon to highlight yet another weakness in new technologies.
"It's a perpetual cat-and-mouse game," he said. "The big companies work hard to prevent this type of thing, but they can never be perfect.
"There's always knowledge that they don't have, that someone else has, that can be used against them," said Hirsh.
"Fundamentally, those who want to get into my system are going to get into my system," said the tech-guru who doesn't use any anti-virus software on his own personal computers.
"Anti-virus software is not going to protect me against the things I want to be protected against so why should I subscribe to an industry that's broken?"
This comes six weeks after Apple launched its new iPhone 3GS, billed as "the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet" by the computer giant.
About 4,000 people are at the Las Vegas conference.
Security experts told Reuters news agency attacks on Apple computers are still quite rare, but that will change once Macs gain a larger market share.