A recent discovery by security experts have Apple users running iOS 10 operating system head over heels after a major iOS 10 vulnerability was discovered. The researcher who led this research and analysis is Gal Beniamini who works as a security researcher with Google Project Zero.
He has discovered this iOS 10 vulnerability to be one of the easiest possible to hack even by an amateur. This vulnerability isn’t only in Apple devices but also in all devices that have Broadcom Wi-Fi chips installed. For this hack to succeed, the hacker just requires the MAC address of the iPhone or network port ID. This will enable full remote access to core elements of the attacked iPhone.
The researcher has reported this vulnerability in an official letter to Broadcom. After this discovery, Apple has fixed this vulnerability in iOS 11 which was updated on September 19th. After this vulnerability was fixed in the new update to iOS, Beniamini released an official report on how he was able to hack the Wi-Fi chip and gain access to devices hosting Broadcom chip.
He conveys that the vulnerability was in the firmware of the Wi-Fi chip named as BCM4355C0 which is not only being used in IPhone but also in numerous models of Android running devices. After gaining the MAC address relatively easily, he installed a backdoor in the Wi-Fi chip with no trouble after which he could remotely read and write commands to attain full control thus exploiting iOS 10 vulnerability to its full extent.
He quotes:
“You can interact with the backdoor to gain R/W access to the firmware by calling the “read_dword” and “write_dword” functions, respectively. However, some symbols might need to be adjusted for different versions of iOS, see ‘exploit/symbols.py’ for more information.”
With all these updates on the iOS 10 vulnerabilities, Apple users are advised to immediately update to iOS 11. Stay updated and stay safe!
