Apple’s pushing a major iOS security update today that iPhone users will want to download and install as soon as they can.
The iOS 9.3.5 update, patch, which Apple is pushing basically right now, fixes three huge security holes in iOS.
The holes are called “zero-day” vulnerabilities: issues in the software that have been undisclosed or unknown until the point at which someone who isn’t the developer finds and/or exploits them.
Motherboard this week reported on a hack that was attempted on a human rights activist from the United Arab Emirates. The activist was rightly suspicious of a text message he received, and forwarded it to security experts.
The experts discovered that the link in the text led to a sophisticated piece of malware, Motherboard reports — and one that exploited three big, brand-new, previously unknown vulnerabilities in iOS. Those security holes, exploited together, would have allowed the attackers to gain full control of the activist’s iPhone.
The security experts took their findings to Apple, which immediately created a patch — the one that it pushed out to users today.
To find not one but three exploitable zero-day bugs in iOS at once is so rare that it has never happened before. In fact, the security experts were professionally impressed.
“We realized that we were looking at something that no one had ever seen in the wild before. Literally a click on a link to jailbreak an iPhone in one step,” one told Motherboard. “One of the most sophisticated pieces of cyberespionage software we’ve ever seen.”
Government Hackers Caught Using Unprecedented iPhone Spy Tool [Motherboard]
by Kate Cox via Consumerist
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