Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Vice:
Apple has mistakenly made it a bit easier to hack iPhone users who are on the latest version of its mobile operating system iOS by unpatching a vulnerability it had already fixed. Hackers quickly jumped on this over the weekend, and publicly released a jailbreak for current, up-to-date iPhones—the first free public jailbreak for a fully updated iPhone that’s been released in years.
Security researchers found this weekend that iOS 12.4, the latest version released in June, reintroduced a bug found by a Google hacker that was fixed in iOS 12.3. That means it’s currently relatively easy to not only jailbreak up to date iPhones, but also hack iPhone users, according to people who have studied the issue.
Pwn20wnd, a security researcher who develops iPhone jailbreaks, published a jailbreak for iOS 12.4 on Monday. For years, jailbreaks have been held closely to the chest by security researchers, because the ability to jailbreak an iPhone means the ability to hack it. As we’ve reported several times, exploits for the iPhone can sell for millions of dollars, which means that no one has been willing to release jailbreak code publicly because Apple will quickly patch it.
MacDailyNews Take: Countdown to iOS 12.4.1 begins now!