Apple iPhone hack is a "horrible week" for everyone
- Mark Skilton
- Aug 26, 2016
- 2 min read
The rushed announcement of 9.3.5 patch update by Apple in what some observers describe as a “horrible week” for Apple is not that surprising given the target of Mobile phones by hacker today as it becomes the credit card and personal assistant of everything.
Time seems to have caught up with Apple who historically appeared immune to cyber threats with their curated iOS operating system but this time they have been exposed with three critical weaknesses called “exploits” or attack areas that when combined together make the phone vulnerable to hackers.
This specific hack was in three areas: remotely jail breaking the iPhone, then installing spyware capable of listening in on the camera and microphone and capable of recording locations, WhatsApp and Viber calls and access to texts which is where it was used and detected by the User receiving unknown texts.
It was again a customer and 3rd party Citizen Lab working with human rights and pro-democracy activist Ahmed Mansoor, that alerted Apple to the threat rather than Apple being aware of this threat.
This is increasingly called “zero day” giving no time to the alert the manufacturer to the attack.
The attack seems to have been politically motivated in this case with the human-rights activitist receiving unsolicited text but is serious for Apple in that it undermines their brand and ecosystem and hence the rapid patch fix.
There are three things to learn from this at least:
Increased complexity of these mobile devices where individual system faults my be acceptance but when combined become a cascade failure
Just having a encrypted app like whatsapp does not protect your privacy if the operating system it runs on if violated
The need for crowd sourcing testing to keep checking and monitoring cyber threats is critical in today's connected business
At least in this case Apple responded rapidly with a fix and told us, other companies who delay telling people of the attack or not detecting the attacks continued are a risk to themselves and their customers and others.
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