At the beginning of the week, a serious vulnerability in Whatsapp (which has already been corrected) has once again brought up the issue of digital security and the question of how protected we are with our smartphones and electronic devices in general.
Taking advantage of the hook, the Motherboard published a story asking the question: How to determine if an iPhone has been hacked or hacked in any way at an earlier time? Well, apparently the frustrating answer: basically impossible and precisely because of the security features of iOS.
According to the security researcher Stefan Esser, there are many vulnerabilities in iOS not yet discovered by Apple, but already widely known by third parties (so-called 0-day exploits) in the underworld of the invasion of iPhones and iPads. The reason most of these vulnerabilities remain unknown to the general public (and therefore without Apple's fix) is precisely the way iOS builds, preventing a complete analysis of its integrity.
Another researcher Claudio Guarnieri (from Amnesty International) notes the irony that there are more devices to unlock iPhones (such as those from infamous companies like Cellebrite and Grayshift) than tools on the other side, detecting if devices have already been hacked and, thereby helping consumers.
In 2016, Esser built an iOS app that was meant to try to detect hacks or jailbreaks malicious and not requested by the user; Apple, meanwhile, has banned the app from its platform. Experts agree that without performing the jailbreak from an iPhone or iPad, almost impossible analyze their integrity or possible history of invasions.
Another researcher, who did not want to identify himself, called iOS a "bug-rich" environment and criticized Apple's strategy of shutting the system down to everything, including external reviews by professionals. According to him, the effective method to keep away from "common" attacks, such as popular low or medium dangerous viruses in Windows, but "counterproductive against professional attacks" as these go unnoticed by most and cannot be searched on common devices. .
If the case of Apple leave iOS a little less safe to paradoxically make you safer?
via the loop
