Displaying items by tag: iMessage

Back in April of this year (2013) we published two articles that countered Apple’s claims that their iMessage application was not as secure as they claimed. The first was after an alleged DEA memo was leaked to CNet. This memo detailed the frustrations of the agency in their inability to acquire text messages sent using Apple iPhones. Sadly for the DEA the “leaked” memo ended up making them look rather foolish as they were trying to get the information from carriers instead of from Apple. Apple countered with their usual, there is no flaw and for many that was that.

Apple experienced one of those things that no service provider wants to have, a multi-hour outage that affects an unknown number of users. Unfortunately this is exactly what happened to Apple today and to both iMessage and Face Time. Now these all on their own are bad and make Apple look a little foolish, but there is more to it than just the loss of text and video messaging to iPhone and iPad owners. This outage and loss of transmission capabilities also makes a recent note that was “leaked” by the DEA to cnet look a little foolish.

So Apple has responded to the issue with SMS (Short Message System) that appears to heavily affect Apple iPhones. In a statement released to Engadget they sat the following: “Apple takes security very seriously. When using iMessage instead of SMS, addresses are verified which protects against these kinds of spoofing attacks. One of the limitations of SMS is that it allows messages to be sent with spoofed addresses to any phone, so we urge customers to be extremely careful if they're directed to an unknown website or address over SMS.”