New Threat Can Auto-Brick Apple Devices
Summary: Researchers Patrick Kelley and Matt Harrigan built a hostile Wi-Fi network called "Phonebreaker" using about $120 of electronics, including a Raspberry Pi, that spoofed time.apple.com and pushed Apple devices' internal clocks back to January 1, 1970, causing test iPads to reboot, overheat to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and fail to boot. The flaw affected 64-bit Apple devices running any iOS version below 9.3.1, which Apple released as a fix; researcher Zach Straley had first demonstrated in a February 2016 video that manually setting an iPhone or iPad to that date would brick it.
What you should know: The attack needed only a fake open network named after one the device already trusted, such as "attwifi," so any iPad that had ever joined a Starbucks hotspot could be bricked by walking within range of a $120 rig - and Apple's own security team reported battery temperatures that did not exceed 45.8 degrees Celsius, well below what the researchers observed.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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