When I broke into my neighbor’s home earlier this week, I didn’t use any cat burglar skills. I don’t know how to pick locks. I’m not even sure how to use a crowbar. It turns out all anyone needs to invade a friend’s apartment is an off switch for their conscience and an iPhone. This was done politely: I even warned him the day before. My neighbor lives on the second floor of a Brooklyn walk-up, so when I came to his front door he tossed me a pair of keys rather than walk down the stairs to let me in. I opened the door, climbed the stairs, and handed his keys back to him. We chatted about our weekends. I drank a glass of water. Then I let him know that I would be back soon to gain unauthorized access to his home. Less than an hour later, I owned a key to his front door. |
Speaking at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE/X) conference in New York, Jonathan Zdziarski basically shot down Apple’s claims about security and their efforts to safeguard iOS devices from police and government snooping. Zdziarski, better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community, worked as dev-team member on many of the early iOS jailbreaks and is the author of five iOS-related O’Reilly books including "Hacking and Securing iOS Applications." In his talk, Zdziarski revealed "a number of undocumented high-value forensic services running on every iOS device" and "suspicious design omissions in iOS that make collection easier." He also provided examples of forensic artifacts acquired that "should never come off the device" without user consent. |
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Users with out of date plug-ins will be met with a message saying, "Blocked plug-in," "Flash Security Alert" or "Flash out-of-date" when attempting to access Flash content in Safari. Clicking on the alert takes users to Adobe's Flash installer page, where the latest version of the plug-in can be downloaded and installed. |
