Hackers Want to Hijack Your iPhone Via SMS

If you receive a strange looking SMS on your iPhone this Thursday, you’d better turn it off right away as it might enable hackers to infect your iPhone and take control of it. That’s what a Forbes article is reporting today anyways.

Using a flaw they’ve found in the iPhone’s handling of text messages, the researchers say they’ll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone’s functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device’s camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.

Why would they do that? Simply to show Apple how vulnerable this iPhone bug really is. Apparently, the hackers notified Apple about a month ago, but Apple didn’t bother responding to them.

We’ve known about this SMS bug for a while now and Apple will probably release the patch in the next OS update 3.1, supposed to be available sometimes in September (that’s what the rumor says).

I think the chances you receive such a SMS are pretty thin, but you never know…