How To Hijack ‘Every iPhone In The World’

On Thursday, two researchers plan to reveal an unpatched iPhone bug that could virally infect phones via SMS.

If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.

That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. 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.

“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” Miller told Forbes. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”

Though Miller and Mulliner say they notified Apple about the vulnerability more than a month ago, the company hasn’t released a patch, and it didn’t respond to Forbes’ repeated calls seeking comment.

The iPhone SMS bug is just one of a series that the researchers plan to reveal in their talk. They say they’ve also found a similar texting bug in Windows Mobile that allows complete remote control of Microsoft-based devices. Another pair of SMS bugs in the iPhone and Google’s Android phones would purportedly allow a hacker to knock a phone off its wireless network for about 10 seconds with a series of text messages. The trick could be repeated again and again to keep the user offline, Miller says. Though Google has patched the Android flaw, this second iPhone bug also remains unpatched, he adds.

The new round of bugs aren’t the first that Miller has dug up in the iPhone’s code. In 2007, he became the first to remotely hijack the iPhone using a flaw in its browser. But while that vulnerability gave the attacker a similar power over the phone’s functions, it required tricking the user into visiting an infected Web site to invisibly download a piece of malicious software. When Miller alerted Apple in July of that year, the company patched the vulnerability before Miller publicized the bug at the Black Hat conference the following month.

BlackBerry Storm Tips and Tricks

I ran into this article by Al Sacco while browsing the web, where he lays out some of the tricks and shortcuts for using the Storm that he has discovered. I am not a Storm user so this tips are from his point of view, and I thought some of you might find this information helpful if you’re one of the many using the first touchscreen Blackberry

Here are a few of the most useful tips that Al Sacco noted on his article (the Storm has three types of on-screen keyboards):

Keyboard shortcuts

• To switch back and forth between multitap and suretype while on portrait mode, simply hit the menu and navigate to the options to enable either one;
• to bring up the keyboard, swipe your finger upward till the middle, and to hide it, downwards from the top;
• to type special characters such as “ñ”, tap the “n” letter, but don’t click it; a menu of options will appear and give you the special characters, so you can just select your option and click it;
• to lock in the number options, hold down the “123” key for a few seconds and it should remain locked until you hide it; to unlock it, hold the “123” key again;
• to lock in the capital letter mode, hold the “shift/arrow up” for a few seconds; to unlock it, repeat that step;
• to change text input languages, hold the Storm in landscape mode, bring up the virtual keyboard and click the “Globe” key found directly to the left of the Space key. Next, scroll to the desired language, highlight it and click the Storm’s screen to select.

NAVIGATING WITH THE STORM

• Scrolling through messages/Web page: to scroll downward, place your finger lightly at the bottom of the screen, (don’t click) and drag upwards; to scroll down a full screen, slide your finger rapidly;
• to scroll up, place your finger lightly at the top of the screen and drag down; to scroll fast, just drag your finger down rapidly;
• zoom: to zoom in a picture or Webpage, tap the screen lightly twice; to zoom out, hit the escape button;
• pan: just place your finger lightly on the screen without clicking and move it in the direction you desire;
• switching through active apps: hold the Blackberry menu button until a ribbon of active apps appear; tap the ribbon and scroll to select the application you are looking for.

Text & Messaging

• Copy & Paste – to copy and paste text from one location to another, lightly touch a finger to the Storm’s screen at the start of the text you wish to copy and hold it in place; with your other finger, touch the end where you wish to copy, this highlights the text; then hit the menu key, scroll to copy and follow the same steps to paste;
• to quickly search your messages for all mailings from a specific contact, find a message from that contact in your Messages application and then gently hold a finger on screen directly over the contact’s name; after a few seconds, all messages from that contact will appear on screen;
• to delete multiple messages at once, open your Messages app and gently hold a finger on a message near the top of the list you want to delete; keep that finger in place and touch another message further down the list; all the messages between your two fingers will be highlighted; from there, you can click the Delete Messages key at the bottom or the screen to do away with the selected messages, or you can continue to select older messages by keeping one finger on the selected messages and scrolling down.

Ecommerce Tips and Tricks

It can be difficult getting your ecommerce business off the ground. Once you have the basics down, the products selected, website designed and promotion in place, what can you do to improve things? There are plenty of ecommerce tips and tricks to get your business moving faster than the competition. So, without further ado, let's take a look at some of them.

- Consider starting a blog. Whether on your ecommerce site or separately, you can start a blog to bring attention to your website. By their very nature, blogs bring in lots of search engines fast and repeat visitors. As long as you are posting useful information several times a week, people will visit your blog. You can list it in blog directories and link back to your ecommerce site at every chance you get!

- Creating fresh content is a good way to bump yourself up in the search engines as well. By adding articles weekly or more often to your ecommerce site, you stand a much better chance of the major search engines like Google checking you out on a regular basis.

- Keep your website simple and easy to navigate. That means eliminating unnecessary graphics and Flash animations, so you have a nice clean site. Also, contact and order information should be very obvious on every single page. Don't create subdirectories of subdirectories, everything on your site should be within two clicks of the home page.

- Stay focused by choosing your product niche and sticking with it. For example, if you sell used medical equipment, don't expand into used books. If you want to start another area, set up a second website so you don't confuse visitors.

- Double check your links. Simply by visiting your own ecommerce website and clicking on the links to make sure they work, you can save a lot of complaints and lost sales. No one likes a broken link and many people will simply leave your site instead of reporting it.
- Take advantage of your meta tags. They can actually get you a higher ranking on the search engines, so use them!

- Set up a merchant account so you can accept credit cards online. This will boost your sales dramatically. Also, being able to accept major payment services such as e-Gold and PayPal will help you make more sales since people trust these sites.

- Don't ramble in your product descriptions. People want to know the features and benefits in a few seconds and won't usually read anything longer than 2-4 lines, so keep it short! Web surfers have short attention spans.

- Update your information frequently. If you change your prices, make sure that the change is reflected on every page. This avoids a messy looking site with contradictive information in different areas.

By following the tips given in this article, you will find yourself boosting the visibility and popularity of your website. This is vital in maintaining your ecommerce site ahead of the competition!