iPhone Hacked

By the time excited consumers were unwrapping their brand new iPhones, hackers had already found ways to hack into the iPhone. While AT&T had a nightmarish time dealing with activation problems, hackers are claiming to have successfully activated iPhones without paying for the service. Web sites like iphonehacks.com and numerous blogs are full of information related to iPhone hacks.

It didn’t take very long for researchers at Errata Security to find several security holes in Apple’s new iPhone, as reported by DarkReading.com. Errata discovered at least three major flaws in iPhone, which is based on a version of OS X. One of them has to do with a heap overflow bug in Safari browser. If a user visits a malicious Web site, it can potentially take over your iPhone. For example, if a user clicks on a spam message it can take him/her to the malicious Web site. This is only one of several examples of how the iPhone can be hacked due to this vulnerability.

Another bug is in the iPhone’s Bluetooth feature related to a potential denial-of-service attack. A third bug has to do with data “seepage” that can potentially cause data to be exposed by client applications over a WiFi connection. Similar to the known problem on Mac notebooks, if you come close to a wireless access point (WAP), your iPhone may just decide to connect to it and expose your information without your knowledge.

Errata, Flexilis, and other security companies are finding more bugs. However, security researchers say that they will wait until Apples announces the flaws before they will go public with their findings.