Security researchers at Google have found evidence of a “sustained effort” to hack iPhones over a period of at least two years.The attack was said to be carried out using websites which would discreetly implant malicious software to gather contacts, images and other data. Google’s analysis suggested the booby-trapped websites were said to have been visited thousands of times per week, the BBC reported.
Commenting on the news, Boris Cipot, senior sales engineer at Synopsys, stated:
For a long time, there was a myth that iOS and OSX are secure operating systems and don’t need any security systems like anti-malware to protect them. We have seen in some cases that apple systems were breached, but those were mostly breaches to iCloud and similar. This last attack example just shows that there is no such thing as a completely secure operating system. Apple surely did a good job of preventing attacks or making them harder to execute by restricting how the software can be installed and where from. However, this is a control process that lowers the risk of security breaches rather than eliminating it. The level of complexity in today’s software development and the developed functionalities alone bring a certain risk factor and, with that, the possibility for an attack. When other software is installed on the operating system, the risk increases further.
I hope that this will be a wake-up call for anyone that has been under the impression that iOS phones are invulnerable to malware exploiting system and application vulnerabilities.
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Article Link: http://digitalforensicsmagazine.com/blogs/?p=2814