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New iPhone Attack Kills Apps, Reroutes Web Traffic
Trailrunner7 sends in a threatpost.com article on exploiting flaws in the way the iPhone handles digital certificates. "[Several flaws] could lead to an attacker being able to create his own trusted certificate and entice users into downloading malicious files onto their iPhones. The result of the attack is that a remote hacker is able to change some settings on the iPhone and force all of the user's Web traffic to run through any server he chooses, and also to change the root certificate on the phone, enabling him to man-in-the-middle SSL traffic from that phone. ... Charlie Miller, an Apple security researcher at Independent Security Evaluators, said that the attack works, although it would not lead to remote code execution on the iPhone. 'It definitely works. I downloaded the file and ran it and it worked,' Miller said. 'The only thing is that it warns you that the file will change your phone, but it also says that the certificate is from Apple and it's been verified.'"
Still not a virus Fake edit: Bah, beat by someone who didn't bother to log in.
Norton is a virus.
No, they state that they are more secure. I don't think I've ever seen someone claim they are invulnerable. That would be foolish. That said, the issue here seems to be with Verisign issuing a certificate for Apple Computer, not with the phone OS itself. At some point you have to trust your root certificate credentials.
Why did they hand out a certificate like this?
the anonymous researchers obtained a signature certificate from VeriSign for a company named Apple Computer.
From the article it looks like Verisign is the problem here.
Why bother