iPhone SMS Virus – Here Are the Facts

Yesterday we received numerous reports from our readers worried about an iPhone hack that allows a malicious programmer to take control of your iPhone using SMS messages. Most of the hysteria around this issue was caused by main stream media news outlets over hyping this issue as if iPhone’s were already getting hacked. Rest assured, there is no known SMS iPhone hack running loose in the wild, however, this doesn’t mean your not vulnerable to this attack.

Read on to get the straight facts a learn how you can secure your iPhone from this SMS flaw.

The fact of the matter is that security experts Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner discovered a weakness in the iPhone that could allow hackers to take control of your phone just by sending a single text message (SMS). They made their findings public at the Black Hat conference, which means of course, that criminals learn about this hole at the same time everyone else does. This was misinterpreted by many people assuming that hackers were already sending SMS viruses to unsuspecting iPhone users. Fortunately, this was not the case and Apple has already responded by releasing a patch update that will make your iPhone more secure.

So why would these two people announce their findings at a hackers convention? Well, they say they told Apple about this earlier this month and got absolutely no response back. They wanted to bring attention to the flaw and what better way then telling a bunch of hackers? Apparently, that lit a fire under Apple’s rear and got them to get a security fix out the door today in the iPhone 3.0.1 update.

If you haven’t updated your iPhone’s OS, you should go do that soon. In the meantime, don’t accept any SMS messages that appear as a single square character because that could be a virus. You don’t have to do anything with the message to get hacked. Just by receiving it, you’ve already been hacked. If you see a message like this, you should turn off your phone immediately and take it to your nearest Apple Store.

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