Hackers Can Break Into an iPhone Just by Sending a Text

When you think about how hackers could break into your smartphone, you probably imagine it would start with clicking a malicious link in a text, downloading a fraudulent app, or some other way you accidentally let them in. It turns out that's not necessarily so—not even on the iPhone, where simply receiving an iMessage could be enough to get yourself hacked.

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich is presenting multiple so-called “interaction-less” bugs in Apple’s iOS iMessage client that could be exploited to gain control of a user’s device. And while Apple has already patched five of them, a few have yet to be patched.

“These can be turned into the sort of bugs that will execute code and be able to eventually be used for weaponized things like accessing your data,” Silvanovich says. “So the worst-case scenario is that these bugs are used to harm users.”