Exploit that Caused iPhones To Repeatedly Dial 911 Reveals Grave Cybersecurity Threat, Say Experts (9to5mac.com)

Ben Lovejoy, writing for 9to5Mac: We reported back in October on an iOS exploit that caused iPhones to repeatedly dial 911 without user intervention. It was said then that the volume of calls meant one 911 center was in 'immediate danger' of losing service, while two other centers had been at risk -- but a full investigation has now concluded that the incident was much more serious than it appeared at the time. It was initially thought that a few hundred calls were generated in a short time, but investigators now believe that one tweeted link that activated the exploit was clicked on 117,502 times, each click triggering a 911 call. The WSJ reports that law-enforcement officials and 911 experts fear that a targeted attack using the same technique could prove devastating. Of the 6,500 911 call centers nationwide, just 420 are believed to have implemented a cybersecurity program designed to protect them from this kind of attack.

Comments

hasn't apple patched it by now?

[known_coward_69]

and since most IOS users are on the latest version how is this still a problem?

Re:hasn't apple patched it by now?

[DontBeAMoran]

Most iOS users are on the latest version that's available for their iPhone model, unless they've heard the latest release will make their current iPhone slower - which happens a lot.

Re:hasn't apple patched it by now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, I'm going to install iOS 10 on my iPhone 4 - NOT!

Re:hasn't apple patched it by now?

[Mashiki]

It likely isn't a conspiracy theory. Nvidia seems to do something like this with graphics drivers and old video cards. Where AMD equivalents weren't suffering the same generational loss even with newer drivers. In many cases the AMD cards improve more even further in the cards lifetime. Ex: A 670 is approx to a 7950-7980. Today with the newest drivers it struggles to hold against a 7750, where that same 7950 in some cases is at the level of a 680.

Re:hasn't apple patched it by now?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Most iOS users are on the latest version that's available for their iPhone model, unless they've heard the latest release will make their current iPhone slower - which happens a lot.

Four-year-old iPhones are still upgradable to the latest version of iOS.

If you're going to claim that there's a huge number of iPhones which are intentionally not being upgraded, you should probably provide some sort of citation.

Re:hasn't apple patched it by now?

[tlhIngan]

Oh yeah, I'm going to install iOS 10 on my iPhone 4 - NOT!

Considering the iPhone 4 was released sometime in ... 2010, it might be worthwhile to upgrade. 7 years of improvements (there's more years ahead of it than behind it - as the first iPhone came out in 2007).

And last I saw, 90% of users were running some form of iOS 10, with 9.5+% using iOS9 The remaining 0.5% were left as "other" (iOS 8 and below).

Re:bug bounty

[Anonymous Coward]

Ben Lovejoy, the article author, is known for sensationalist journalism. It's a click-bait piece, like everything else he writes.

Not an exploit

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not an exploit. It is an app that asks for the user to give it permission to make phone calls, which the user grants. Then the app calls 911.

There is nothing about iOS that is "exploited" to make this happen. The only thing that is exploited is user stupidity, which should come as no surprise given that education is the least important priority in the US.

Re:Really serious

[johnsie]

What if christians or atheists did? After all they do kill more Americans than the muslims.

Re:Apple no better at security

[MachineShedFred]

It's true that they inherited a good security design from BSD, but they did some of their own thinking and it was one example of where the engineers and architects actually convinced Steve Jobs he was wrong - having a protected Applications folder, and requiring privilege escalation to install software. He thought they were nuts at the time, but in an interview much later he recounted how Avie Tevanian convinced him that it was necessary, and that Jobs was immensely thankful that he did.