What if there were a flaw in your iPhone operating system that could let evil-intentioned hackers steal your passwords unnoticed, and your only current defense was to keep your phone offline at all times?
There is, according to a security researcher.
Tyler Bohan of Cisco’s threat-intelligence unit reported the “extremely critical bug” that would allow a hacker to steal passwords simply by sending a multi-media text message to a user’s iPhone, according to Forbes.
“The receiver of an MMS cannot prevent exploitation and MMS is a store-and-deliver mechanism, so I can send the exploit today and you will receive it whenever your phone is online,” Bohan told Forbes.
Apple’s Safari web browser is also vulnerable, Forbes reported: “The attack could also be delivered over Safari; all that would be required would be for the user to visit a website containing the malicious code and for the browser to parse the exploit. No interaction with the site would be required.”
And now that Bohan has outed the vulnerability, the clock is ticking. “Talos estimates there is about a two-week effort to get from the information we disclosed publicly to a fully working exploit with a decent amount of reliability,” he told Forbes for the report published earlier this week.
Apple’s just-released operating system, 9.3.3, has patches to prevent such an exploit, according to Forbes. On paper, the new system “is perhaps the least exciting iOS 9 update Apple has released,” Forbes said in another article. The system is a “pure bug and security patch,” according to Forbes.
Photo illustration: An iPhone held up in front of the Apple logo. (AFP/Getty Images)
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