“Last weekend, a hacker who’s been campaigning to make a point about Apple security by playing fast and loose with the now widely-accepted definition of ‘backdoor’ struck gold when journalists didn’t do their homework and erroneously reported a diagnostic mechanism as a nefarious, malfeasant, secret opening to their private data,” Violet Blue reports for ZDNet.
“Speaking at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, Jonathan Zdziarski said that Apple’s iOS contains intentionally created access that could be used by governments to spy on iPhone and iPad users to access a user’s address book, photos, voicemail and any accounts configured on the device,” Blue reports. “As he has been doing since the Snowden documents started making headlines last year, Mr. Zdziarski re-cast Apple’s developer diagnostics kit in a new narrative, turning a tool that could probably gain from better user security implementation into a sinister ‘backdoor.'”
“Since Mr. Zdziarski presented ‘Identifying back doors, attack points, and surveillance mechanisms in iOS devices,’ his miscasting of Apple’s developer diagnostics as a ‘backdoor’ was defeated on Twitter, debunked and saw SourceClear calling Zdziarski an attention seeker in Computerworld, and Apple issued a statement saying that no, this is false,” Blue reports. “In fact, this allegedly ‘secret backdoor’ was added to diagnostic information that has been as freely available as a page out of a phone book since 2002. The packet capture software used for diagnostics referenced by Mr. Zdziarski in support of his claims is similar in functionality as the one that’s installed on every Apple laptop and desktop computer for diagnostics.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Apple responds to allegations of iOS ‘backdoor’ – July 22, 2014
Forensic scientist claims suspicious ‘back doors’ running on every iOS device – July 21, 2014