US teen trades hacked iPhone for Nissan 350Z
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New wheels 'a great end to a great summer' A New Jersey teenager has cut a deal to trade a hacked iPhone for a new set of wheels and three further iPhones, Yahoo! reports.â¦
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Jon Lech Johansen -- better known as "DVD Jon" -- has announced that he's hacked the iPhone to allow Wi-Fi and iPod functionality without an AT&T wireless plan. Guests posting to his blog confirmed success with his approach.
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One of the developers of the Metasploit hacking package has added support for the iPhone to the software's framework -- a "first step," as he puts it, for those wishing to mod their devices in certain ways.
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Until the army of intrepid hackers succeeds in commandeering the gadget's command line, the fastest way to any iPhone user's heart is through the web browser.
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(InfoWorld) - Three security researchers claimed Sunday that they have found the first exploitable vulnerability in Apple's iPhone, a flaw that allows them to steal any data from the device or even to turn it into a remote surveillance tool. The trio -- Charles Miller, formerly with the National Security Agency; Jake Honoroff; and Joshua Mason of Baltimore-based Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) -- have notified Apple of the vulnerability and given the company less than two weeks to fix the bug before Miller presents more information at the Black Hat conference on Aug. 2. According to a paper posted by the three, they rooted out a vulnerability in the iPhone's version of Safari using "fuzzing" tools and wrote a proof-of-concept exploit that can be delivered from a malicious Web site or using "man in the middle" tactics to trick users into connecting to a malicious wireless access point. Once the exploit runs, it's essentially game over, the researchers said: The iPhone is owned. "In our proof of concept, this code reads the log of SMS messages, the address book, the call history, and the voicemail data," the researchers wrote on the ISE site. "It then transmits all this information to the attacker." But wait -- there's more! That, however, could be just the beginning. The researchers claimed that a second exploit actually operated the iPhone remotely once the device was hijacked. "When we viewed a second HTML page in our iPhone, it ran the second exploit payload which forced [the iPhone] to make a system sound and vibrate for a second," they said in the paper. "Alternately, by using other API functions we discovered, the exploit could have dialed phone numbers, sent text messages, or recorded audio (as a bugging device) and transmitted it over the network for later collection by a malicious party." The vulnerability was reported to Apple last Tuesday, July 17. "We proposed a fix Apple could include in a future iPhone update," the researchers said, "but we don't know if they plan to do so. They responded and are looking into it." In an e-mail late Sunday night, Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox would only say: "Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users. We're looking into the report submitted by I.S.E. and always welcome feedback on how to improve our security." She declined to answer questions about the Aug. 2 deadline, whether Apple would issue a patch before then, or what the company thought of the way the trio disclosed the vulnerability. Miller will provide more information on the vulnerability and exploit at the upcoming Black Hat 2007 security conference, which opens next Saturday, July 28, in Las Vegas. But is this the ethical way? ISE's president, Avi Rubin, defended the decision to announce the existence of the vulnerability prior to a patch being made available by Apple. "Why are we doing that? Well, I believe that there is a social responsibility to report it when a device is vulnerable to attackers," said Rubin on his own blog Sunday. "People buy these things and use them in ways that put their identity and their online accounts at risk, and by exposing these vulnerabilities, we can make users better judges of how to use their high-tech devices." Rubin is familiar to many security observers from his research into problems with electronic voting systems. The paper by Miller, Honoroff, and Mason also spelled out a number of weaknesses in the iPhone's security architecture, although it didn't specifically pin the vulnerability on any of those flaws. One, however, most likely contributed to the reach of the exploit. "There are serious problems with the design and implementation of security on the iPhone," the paper said. "The most glaring is that all processes of interest run with administrative privileges. This implies that a compromise of any application gives an attacker full access to the device." Other deficiencies the trio cited in the iPhone's operating system included not using address randomization -- a technique applied by Windows Vista that's designed to make it tougher for hackers to write reliable attack code -- and allowing code in the heap to execute. Those last two shortcomings have been criticized in the desktop version of Mac OS X for some time. Three months ago, during the fallout after a hacking contest that jacked a MacBook Pro notebook, HD Moore -- the vulnerability researcher noted for the Metasploit hacking and attack testing software -- took on the claim that Mac OS X is safer than Windows. "The Mac OS X platform is years behind Linux, Windows, and OpenBSD in terms of operating-system security," said Moore then. "All of the above platforms support some form of address randomization (ASLR) and include features that make exploitation slightly more difficult." The ISE researchers have also posted a short video of their hack in action on YouTube.
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It's beauty versus geek when a man convicted of hacking into LexisNexis last year allegedly hijacks the MySpace account of an 18-year-old Los Angeles woman with a popular streaming video show. When the hacker allegedly demands nude photos and phone, he gets returned to the pokey instead.
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Hackers have found a way to use Apple Inc's iPhone on networks other than AT&T Inc's, opening up the coveted device to rival carriers and overseas customers, according to a Web report on Friday.
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A 15-year-old boy allegedly scammed credit card information from more than a dozen people and then used their cards to buy a car he outfitted like a police cruiser.
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Also: New Zealand teen runs internet banking scam. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Police said they had arrested a Polish teenager Wednesday after he allegedly used a homemade device to derail city trams in Lodz, central Poland.
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(InfoWorld) - What a world. We have to fight off viruses, zombies, bots, phishing, and on and on. Can you believe how many just plain evil people there are in the world? And what is their point? Simple thievery? To prove they are smarter than the rest of us? And think of all the money that's spent on defending, as best we can, against these miscreants or in cleaning up the mess when they get the better of us? Indeed, what a waste. While viruses have appeared on mobile devices, they are, thankfully, few and far between. Part of the reason for this has been a lack of standardization of software environments on handsets, and part is due to the minimal functionality that is typical on these products. It's hard for the socially challenged to overwrite boot sectors, corrupt data, or otherwise run amok on most cell phones today. Apple's decision to limit local software execution on the iPhone is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to a fundamental fear of hackers. While the Macintosh hasn't been much of a target for the hacker community, the iPhone could be a lot more tempting. There will be far more iPhones than Macs in the world in just a few years. Plus, Apple partner AT&T doesn't need the support headaches that come with having a large number of users jamming its 800 numbers with reports of bizarre symptoms on their iPhones. Regardless, being a Web services guy, I absolutely applaud Apple for moving the Web services art forward a notch or two with a very capable platform that might indeed replace PCs for many of us over the next decade or so. We don't need to run a lot of local code to have a meaningful IT experience while on the go. Of course, the iPhone will be hacked over time, requiring updates and fixes, just as is the case with the PC. There are already reports of hackers working diligently to unlock the phone so that non-AT&T SIM cards can be used, and to avoid cellular activation so that the device would be used only Wi-Fi networks -- with VoFi services, of course. Any programmable device runs this kind of risk, and defending against unauthorized code will remain a challenge for some time to come. Which brings me to a really obscure but very important, shall we say, "opportunity" for hackers. Last year, I wrote about one of the most exciting technology developments in wireless, software-defined radio (SDR). Basically, SDR simplifies radio hardware design by replacing specialized circuitry with software. Among the many benefits of SDR are over-the-air bug fixes, the ability to add new features on demand, and dynamic reprogrammability -- turning, for example, a GSM phone into a CDMA phone or even Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or UWB or whatever on the fly. With so much software at play here, the question has to be asked: Could an SDR get hacked? Suppose someone figures out how to build a virus that quickly spreads to SDR-based handsets, disabling them or using them as jammers or worse? What if those handsets are being used for public-safety applications? This is not to say that hacking is the only vector for wireless disruptions. After all, anyone can use a jammer to disable communications in a local area, and any moron with a reasonable shortwave transmitter can pretend to be an air traffic controller. That fact that we still use an unencrypted, unauthenticated communications protocol for such a critical service boggles my mind. The FCC is rightfully concerned about SDR hacking and has issued new regulations for SDRs that mostly attempt to deal with open source software in SDR applications. There is significant concern that open source software creates specific vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit. I don't think this is very likely for two reasons. First, open source isn't the same as open architectures. Each product vendor would of necessity keep certain elements of their implementation secret, locking out all but the most determined hackers. But secondly, and more importantly, the real issue is how to protect individual phones from ever loading harmful software. We already have pretty good techniques for this from the PC world, and there are many effective approaches to solving this particular security concern. It could even be argued that the technical scrutiny that comes with open source actually enhances security and integrity; the real issue is controlling what software, open source or not, gets onto the mobile device. As I noted in my last column, the big issue with SDR isn't hackers or security: It is the need to lower the power demands of SDR implementations so that they have a prayer of running on batteries. The road to SDR-based handsets isn't at all paved yet, but open source is a relatively minor concern.
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It arrived in a blaze of publicity and had frenzied gadget fans queuing for days before its launch last month. But just weeks after Apple's iPhone was unleashed on American shoppers, researchers say they have discovered how to hack into it and steal personal information.
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According to Saul Hansell at the NY Times, Apple intends to break phones that have been unlocked.  But Francine Hardaway and Patrick Scoble both updated this afternoon, and bad things happened. Hardaway's phone was "fried," she needed a new phone, and Scoble lost all his data. Hardaway: "Trust me, I didn't hack it." Jeff Clavier: "This effing piece of s..t is bricked." Robert Scoble, Patrick's dad, updated successfully, and got the new features. Spaley's iPhone is "a useless piece of crap." Looks like Josh Bancroft's iPhone was hosed too. I would hold off on the update until we find out what's going wrong.  Sugar Attack: "It wasn't until I saw a friend tweet about the new iPhone firmware upgrade that I realized I could now access the iTunes WiFi store."
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A group of hackers releases perhaps the easiest application yet for getting third-party software onto iPhones running the most up-to-date version of Apple's firmware.
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Hackers have found a way to use  Apple Inc's  iPhone on networks other than AT&T Inc's  , opening up the coveted device to rival carriers and  overseas customers, according to a Web report on Friday.
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A new language is being developed by cell phone-addicted teens based on predictive text.
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Hackers have broken the chains that bind iPhone users to AT&amp;T. Will lawyers be the next ones on the line?