In the continuing cyber security war to infiltrate mobile phones to steal your information, Apple has tackled the issue of the iPhone’s major security flaw.
While iPhone users may have rejoiced when they discovered that the FBI couldn’t hack the iPhone of the San Bernadino shooter earlier this year, we have since discovered that the Apple iOS has several security flaws. As of today, we have learned that in just one tap, hackers could actually use your phone as a digital spy. This of course has great consequences on civil liberties and commercial espionage if someone accidentally clicked on something they thought was innocent.
In an attack against human rights lawyer, Ahmed Mansoor, cyber criminals attempted to lure him to click on a link to discover alleged cases of people secretly being tortured in the United Arab Emirates.
The BBC reported:
Had he done so, Citizen Lab says, his iPhone 6 would have been “jailbroken”, meaning unauthorised software could have been installed.
“Once infected, Mansoor’s phone would have become a digital spy in his pocket, capable of employing his iPhone’s camera and microphone to snoop on activity in the vicinity of the device, recording his WhatsApp and Viber calls, logging messages sent in mobile chat apps, and tracking his movements,” said Citizen Lab.
“We are not aware of any previous instance of an iPhone remote jailbreak used in the wild as part of a targeted attack campaign, making this a rare find.”
The researchers say they believe the spyware involved was created by NSO Group, an Israeli “cyber-war” company.
This sophisticated spyware campaign that was created to try and turn Mansoor’s phone into a digital spy was a “zero day” package. Usually sold from upwards of $1 million dollars when targeting major software such as the Apple iOS, researchers say this is the ‘most sophisticated spyware package’ that they had seen as it actually combined several zero days to create it.
Fortunately Apple is on the ball and has created a software update to tackle this problem. The update is available for the iPhone 4S and later, iPad 2 and later, and iPod Touch 5th generation and later. Please visit here to apply the update. The update will repair vulnerabilities which hackers can potentially use to gain access to your phone and information such as your online banking details.
