iPhone Hacked In Under 60 Seconds Using Malicious Charger

DavidGilbert99 writes "Apple's iOs has been known as a bastion of security for many years, but three researchers have now shown iPhones and iPads can be hacked in just under 60 seconds using nothing more than a charger. OK, so it's not just a charger — but the Mactans charger does delete an official app (say Facebook) replacing it with an official-looking one which is actually malware which could access your contacts, messages, emails, phone calls and even capture your passwords. Apple says it will fix the flaw, but not until the release of iOS 7, the date of which hasn't been confirmed yet. So watch out for chargers left lying around ..." (For less in the way of auto-playing video ads with sound, check out the Mac Observer's take, which concludes "[I]t's nifty that Apple is addressing the issue in iOS 7. We'd also like to see it fixed in iOS 6. Apple has historically seen iPhone users upgrade to the newest version iOS in staggeringly high numbers, but eliminating this problem across the board seems the wiser choice.")

Comments

Re:they need to backport it to ios 6

[plover]

Apple pulled Google maps because they didn't want to agree to the privacy rules Google wanted. The cost to Apple has ben hundreds of millions if they aren't up a billion yet. You can agree with Apple's call here or not, but screwing the customers financially was not the motivation.

They may have said "privacy", but that was a smokescreen. It was about nothing but money. Apple is in head-to-head competition with Google, and allowing their primary competitor a choice seat on their home screen and garnering the search, location, and resultant ad revenue was an affront they could no longer abide.

Apple truly believed they could get away with it and that customers wouldn't care. They believed that they would deliver such a hot-shit mapping app with useful turn-by-turn screens that consumers would just love it like they loved everything else Apple produced. They committed themselves to delivering on that belief. And as release day arrived, and initial reviews came back, they began to realize that buying TomTom's map was buying little more than a pig in a poke, and began to wonder if it wasn't a mistake. But they had no idea of the size of the PR nightmare they were creating, and they did not expect the backlash that came out of betraying their fans.

I seriously doubt that iOS7 will be adopted at the rate iOS6 was. But I may be underestimating the power of auto-updates. A large number of people just won't care no matter what Apple does.