iOS Vulnerability Exposed As Messaging Threat Crashes Thousands Of iPhones And iPads

A new form of messaging threat affecting iOS users is being blocked by AdaptiveMobile’s Network Protection Platform for mobile operators. The mobile security company has been actively monitoring the issue since news broke late last week, and detected and blocked more than one million malicious messages over just 24 hours within their North American customer base.

“In response to the vulnerabilities, AdaptiveMobile has taken steps to implement proactive blocking to protect subscribers. Weve been monitoring our customer networks and so far weve detected and blocked hundreds of thousands of people who have attempted to send their contacts these messages, with some people attempting to send the same message hundreds of times,” says Cathal McDaid, Head of Data Intelligence and Analytics, AdaptiveMobile. “We expect these volumes to rise while this, now public, vulnerability continues to exist in the iPhone operating system.”

Discovered by users on social media sites early on May 27th, the bug immediately crashes an iPhone, iPad, or iPod upon opening the message. The message threat comes as a specific string of characters that can be sent via iMessage or text message.

While social media seems to be driving the majority of the attacks, one security concern is that hackers can leverage this issue to execute immediate denial of service attacks, and that any business with a heavy reliance on iOS could be targeted and blocked from their own devices within a matter of seconds. By analyzing billions of messages in real-time every day from across 75 mobile operators globally, AdaptiveMobile was able to detect the threat and protect their customers within a matter of hours.

More information on this new iOS bug is available on the AdaptiveMobile blog at:
http://www.adaptivemobile.com/blog/attack-on-the-iphones

Source: AdaptiveMobile