iPhone Virus “Podloso” Hits the iPhone Users. Get ready for a iPhone Antivirus! We Saw This Coming Right?

Posted by Shahbaaz ||

July 31, 2009 ||

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iphone-logo You have heard a lot about all the good things the Apple iPhone does but not many are aware of the bugs in the iPhone. Some time ago, an iPhone owner in Texas experienced a serious problem with his iPhone and reported it to the GeekSquad Store.

The Safari browser would not close at any cost. It was acually eating up the memory in the iPhone and ultimately forced it to crash down. When asked, Apple presumptively said it would not occur unless the iPhone was jail broken.

In a crave to enrich the applications suite on the iPhone, many users had their iPhone jail broken, well it does enough good but more than it, it does the evil. Jail breaking your iPhone opens a security hole that hackers can exploit to take control over your iPhone wirelessly and effortlessly.

This means that the iPhone users have something new to worry about besides their AT&T bills, bad coverage, and slow 3G speeds. It also creates business possibilities for the antivirus companies, the company who comes up with the first Antivirus for iPhone is likely to win. Do you really need a iPhone Anti-virus? It’s hard to say at this point but if a company comes up with a Antivirus for iPhone they will scare the users to death if they don’t get one.

Podloso: First Ever iPod Virus

The first iPod virus named Podloso was discovered by Kaspersky Labs that infected the iPods running iPod Linux, a very few of the majority. And what different is the iPhone from the iPod? Sooner or later, we were expecting this sort of chalk to infect the iPhone and today, the day has come.

It’s now the iPhone SMS Virus or iPhone Virus. It’s not really a virus, it’s a bug that was discovered by Charles Miller and Collin Mulliner, two researchers at BlackHat Cybersecurity some six weeks ago.

When the first time, the bug was discovered, it was only meant to crash the iPhone, now it has outgrown the possibilities and it can take over virtually any iPhone with just a simple SMS. So beware!

How do you identify the infection? Not a big deal. Some fine day if you receive a text message with a square character, you must immediately turn off your iPhone or just switch to airplane mode. That’s only how you can resist infection.

The virus can spread to any iPhone, you don’t even need to click a link or so but only if one of the infected phones has got your contact no in it, then you are done. Reports reveal that it is a consequence of the “serious memory corruption bug” that occurs due to the way the iPhone handles messages.

Latest Update: 'i' got Company!

Latest Update: ‘i’ got Company!

When the iPhone bugs or so called iPhone virus was first reported, F-Secure, a security research organization said:

“Hopefully this serves as a warning for those who have opened their iPhones using a security hole in the system and then installing unverified software without a second thought to what they are doing.”

Once your iPhone virus is infects the phone, the hacker is at liberty to take over all the functionalities of your iPhone., from making a call to browsing the web, from accessing the camera to corrupting your applications, and more harmfully, forwarding this virus to other iPhone user. Cnet also termed jailbreaking posed a threat to national security.

“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” said cybersecurity researcher Charles Miller. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”

Even if antivirus security organizations decide to confront the iPhone virus, the biggest hurdle will be the inefficiency of the iphone to run the applications in the background. JR Smith, CEO of AVG said “We can’t add a layer of protection on to the iPhone today, so that’s a lot of the conversation that we’re having with Apple.”

avgdr

In the league: i Like It!

McAfee which has been providing security solutions to Mac for sometime, said “We are working on a much more comprehensive suite for the Apple family.” Because the big deal is providing real time protection from viruses and not actually the antivirus.

More iPhone viruses are likely to emerge as people can’t resist cracking the iPhones and the hackers wouldn’t leave any chance to exploit the wicked possibilities and make the iPhone Original, iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S vulnerable to this attack.

We are expecting a bug fix for this from Apple in its final OS 3.1 release, however Apple has been numb over the issue for all this while, even though the SMS Virus bug was brought to their knowledge about 6 weeks ago.

Time to taste the soup…..’cause ” . . . our pleasures in this world are always to be paid for . . . ” and it implies to iPhone users as well.

Update – 31st July: Apple just confirmed the SMS exploit and also released an update to patch the exploit. To get the latest update, plug your iPhone into your computer, launch iTunes and click on “Check for Updates” and install the new update.