iPhone Jailbreak Tool Sets Stage for Mobile Malware
The success of a group of hackers in compromising the security of Apple's iPhone may set the stage for more malware for the popular handset, including rootkit-style remote monitoring tools and data stealing malware.
In a presentation at the ToorCon Hacking Conference here on Saturday, Eric Monti, a Senior Researcher at Trustwave's Spider Labs demonstrated how the same kind of vulnerabilities and exploits that allowed a team of hackers to "jailbreak" iPhones and iPads from Apple's content restrictions could be used to push rootkit-style malware onto those devices and intercept credit card data from an iPhone-based transaction.
For his presentation, Monti designed a proof of concept iPhone rootkit, dubbed "Fat" by modifying the original jailbreakme code to create a stripped down remote monitoring application. "Fat" was an effort to learn from the work of the team that created jailbreak by "weaponizing" the code, Monti said in an interview with Threatpost. Among other things, the researcher removed system prompts created by the jailbreakme app and added a rootkit feature to remotely control such key iPhone features as the microphone, camera and geolocation services, as well as SMS, he said.
