Displaying items by tag: iOS

Remember the iMessage flaw that allowed for a zero click installation of malware? You know, the one that was discovered by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky which was allegedly targeting Russian Apple devices? The one that Russia said was a US cyber op? Yeah, that one. Well, it seems that Apple has rolled out a patch for this flaw which was part of an operation dubbed Triangulation with the backdoor actually being called TriangleBD.

There is a new bit of malware targeting iOS users via iMessage from what appears to be a new APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) group. The campaign appears to have been in play since some time in 2019. The malware, according to researchers, leverages iMessage to send the targeted user an attachment that then runs with Root Privileges on the device. The result is a complete takeover of the device in question.

Apple has rushed to release patches for CVE-2023-32409, CVE-2023-28204, and CVE-2023-32373 all of which are in the WebKit Browser engine and across all Apple platforms (IOS, IpadOS and macOS). These three flaws have also been seen to be actively exploited in the wild. This increases the significance of them and should be remediated as soon as possible by applying any available patches.

All good things must come to an end. In April of 2013 we published an article that Apple and their iOS based devices would begin to slide in 2016. It was in response to a survey/analysis claiming that Apple would reclaim the crown from Google by 2016 and dominate through 2018. For some reason the technical and financial press were jumping at the announcement for Windows phone 8.x. The fact that Windows phone held a single digit market share at the time did not seem to matter to them.

Want to play a trick on your iPhone owning friends? Well we have a good one for you. According to Reddit there is a sequence of symbols and Arabic characters that will cause an iPhone to crash and reboot. Oh the joy you will have playing this game over and over with your friends. To add even more to the fun the original text that caused the issue will still be in the messenger app. That means if you open it up… your phone reboots again.

The wonderful topic of “kill switches” in smart phones has arisen again with three major cities claiming a directly connection between iPhone theft and the addition of a kill switch into Apple devices. Now the news is pushing stories with titles claiming a 50% reduction in “smart phone” theft. These claims are simply not true. The first thing to note is that Apple is not the only company with a smart phone and the second is that there was already a reduction in theft of Apple device prior to the lunch of the iPhone 6. The demand and allure of the iPhone 5 line was not really enough to get a thief’s hear racing.

Apple is truly ramping up the PR machine and has even managed to get a few people in government to make some rather outrageous statements on the new phone and iOS 8. One of the new stories going around is about how the new iPhone and iOS8 are suddenly “NSA Proof” because they have added data encryption. The fallacy of this claim is almost beyond belief and shows once again that most in the technical press have absolutely no memory.

Although there is enough news about the new iPhones and iOS8 already we thought we would finally chime in since there are now around six separate stories about the new device from Apple. We are seeing everything from high cellular usage to the phones bending in someone’s pocket. Apple, to their credit actually rushed out a fix for many of these issues… sadly the fix appears to make things worse.

Apple has made a decision about the data that is stored in their borrowed HealthKit API. The decision is to ban developers from sharing any of the data that the service collects to ad agencies. This move will be in effect the day that iOS 8 and will run until Apple changes their mind. This move is actually a very good thing and does cover some concerns about the amount of personal information that mobile devices are starting to amass.

There is a lot of information flying around the internet about security this month. Much of this is due to the looming Black Hat and DEF CON conferences that kick off in August. While many of the articles hitting the net are malware centric we are hearing about a few more that punch more than a few holes in the security of some very popular devices. We have seen Blackberry poke at Samsung and their Knox secure phone layer and vice versa. The biggest one that we have seen is the 58 page document published by security expert Jonathan Zdiarski about the iPhone.