iPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cellphone Towers, Apple Claims
Found on Wired on Tuesday, 28 July 2009
The nation's cellphone networks could suffer "potentially catastrophic" cyberattacks by iPhone-wielding hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their shiny wireless devices - that's what Apple claims.
By tinkering with this code, "a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data," Apple wrote the government.
So wait, Apple just said that they made it possible for a skilled hacker to bring down the mobile networks by jailbreaking a phone? You know, I always was under the impression that a software running on mission critical systems should be designed to ignore all potentially dangerous (or just undefined) input. That's one of the basics of system security. To think that Apple assumes that everything coming from an iPhone is perfectly fine and can interoperate with the tower software without any security checks is just baffling. I think I should be more careful when tinkering with electrical devices; who knows, I might just shut down the national power grid. But then, it's not run by Apple.