Important iPhone notice!

There is a vulnerability with Apple's iPhone in which the attacker can take total control of your phone.

It seems that the phone can accept commands received through SMS (text messages). They are called controlled SMS messages and work a little different than regular SMS. The attacker runs the initial SMS and from there, the rest of the messages are unseen and run commands in the background.

So what can the attacker do? Well, anything! They can turn on the camera and see what is around you. They can turn on the microphone and hear what you're saying. They can program your phone to send spam (at your expense) and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, your iPhone is a miniture computer and can do virtually anything that a regular computer can do.

What can you do? I just found out that there is an update that will fix the issue that just came out a day or two ago. You have to plug in your iPhone to iTunes and check for updates. Be sure you manually click the button to check for updates. If you just plug in your phone, it will report that no updates are needed until you manually press the "check for updates" button.

This should fix your phone. I'm wondering if it truly fixes the phone or just "band-aids" it. We'll have to wait and see.

How will you know if you have been attacked? So far, the only indication that you have been attacked is if you get a text message with a square at the end of it. No one has said what the message is about so I assume that it really doesn't matter. But, if there is a square at the end, then the phone has been taken over and you should take the battery out until you are ready to update the phone with the latest patches.

Thomas Johnsen, MCSE+Security, MCDST, CCNA, A+, Net+, Sec+
Lead Engineer
Networthy Systems
Beaumont Texas
thomasjohnsen.smbittips@networthysystems.com
www.networthysystems.com
(409) 861-4450