As mentioned earlier this month, the encryption scheme used on the iPhone is about as useful as fishnets for hiding your assets.  That pales in comparison to what is going to be released as a proof of concept attack on Thursday.  Those pesky security researchers have discovered a way to gain complete control over your iPhone, with just a simple series of 256 SMS messages.  Now, when they say complete control, what they mean is that the remote attacker will be able to dial the phone, visit Web sites, turn on the device’s camera and microphone and even better, they can send text messages, like say those magic 256 SMS messages to every single person in your contact list and phone book, therefore gaining control of those phones.  The presentation on Thursday will have a visible character in the final SMS, a small square, however it is easy to make every single SMS invisible.

Don’t feel too superior if you are a non-iPhone user, a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile devices allows the same type of remote control and there is a lovely little bit of malware that targets the Symbian OS; if you do not recognize the name, it only accounts for half of all cell phones on the market.  More cheerful news by following the link at [H]ard|OCP.

“Researchers plan on revealing details of an iPhone bug later today that allows hacker to take total control of your phone as well as every phone in your contact list. According to the researchers, Apple was notified more than a month ago of the flaw and, at this point, has done nothing to fix it.”

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