Warning : Your iPhone Can Be Hacked With a Modified Charger

So it seems a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a method where an iphone can be hacked just by plugging it into a charger.

"Despite the plethora of defense mechanisms in iOS, we successfully injected arbitrary software into current-generation Apple devices running the latest operating system (OS) software... All users are affected, as our approach requires neither a jailbroken device nor user interaction.”

Their charger, Mactans—that's another name for the Black Widow spider—uses a small onboard computer to perform its underhand duties. In fact it's based on a Texas Instruments BeagleBoard, which retails at $45. While the resulting charger measures three inches square—bigger than your average power supply—it's still a worrisome proof of concept which could easily be squeezed into a smaller form factor if required, just at higher cost.

source



The device is going to be presented at the Black Hat security conference in late July and was spotted by Forbes, was born out of the idea of creating innocent-looking devices which could be used to hack phone.

Id think twice about using any charger thats not your own from now on.

The 'problem' creating the weakness to attack in this manner is the Apple universal connector which gives access to data as well as charging the battery so the charger could potentially contain an interface to the phone's data I/O without the user being aware. Many phones EG Nokia have a dedicated charging connection with no access to data lines (power only) but can be charged via a USB connection as well which would expose them to hacking in the same manner so, if you're worried about potential security breaches, don't charge via a USB cable.

Using your PC's USB interface to charge your phone might leave you open to malware that got into the PC via a trojan and such malware is out there. It's even possible for a virus you unknowingly 'caught' via your smartphone to infect your PC when you go to back up your phone to the PC's HDD.

Only use chargers you know for certain don't have any connection to the 'data' lines if this is a worry.

Who uses a charger they do not own? Dummies, that's who.

Assuming Apple uses the standard USB cabling, just peel the plastic on the cable back a touch, cut the green and white data cables, leaving the black and red intact, slap some insulating tape around and you are good to go.

Simples.

(You will need a spare USB cable should you want to hook your device up to your computer for data transfer)