Is the new iPhone software throwing off your groove with the “i” autocorrect? Well, you might have bigger things to worry about, since iOS 11.1 just got hacked, and it’s a pretty serious one. See if you’re safe here!
Apple has more than 700 million iPhone customers worldwide. Though recently it lost its majority world market share to Samsung, Apple still owns almost 45% of the U.S. market, according to ComScore. That means that almost half of phones in the U.S. are iPhones. And if you’re in that almost 50%, then you’re at risk, since iOS 11.1 just got hacked.
This isn’t iOS 11, released in September. This is the new, updated version, supposedly the one that fixes the bugs and patches the vulnerabilities. Well, if you’re an iPhone user, you’re outta luck. Which means me, too. So what can be done? How can we prevent getting hacked?
Actually, we as iPhone consumers are pretty lucky, because the vulnerability was discovered by security researchers AKA white-hat hackers, which means that they hacked it for the purpose of finding out what was wrong with it, and not with malicious intent.
This isn’t the “i” autocorrect issue that so many have been having. If you haven’t updated, then you might not know, but a big problem that many iPhone users have publicly complained about (see the Tweets below) is that when “i” is typed on its own, it autocorrects to an exclamation mark or a capital “a” with a question-mark-in-a-box symbol. Seems pretty frustrating to a lot of people. It’s harmless, however. Which is more than the security researchers can say about the vulnerability they just found.
Why is my phone autocorrecting the letter I️ to this weird symbol please explain and help me make it stop pic.twitter.com/6YhgOnou48
— Best Coast (@BestCoast) November 1, 2017
What is the hack?
Well, it’s all hush-hush, known only to a few, who made it known to Apple. All we know is that it uses “used a total of four bugs to gain code execution and escalate privileges to allow their rogue application to persist through a reboot,” which comes from Dustin Childs, explaining how the hack was made at the Trend Micro Mobile Pwn2Own 2017 contest.
While Apple works on fixing the bugs, we hope it stays under wraps and that no one gets affected.
Let’s take a step back. How is it that we are at the mercy of tech giants, and have to simply wait for software updates? Do we have to just hope and pray we don’t get hacked while we anxiously wait for the next software update? Are we constantly at risk of cyber attacks?
To be fair, no software is perfect, and that’s why software updates are so important. But don’t think that Apple, or any other software company, is going to sit back and work out the kinks when they get around to it. You pay them, remember? If they didn’t fix their products they would lose their customers real quick.
Are you safe from the hackers in the meantime? When is the next software update going to be released? Like we said earlier, right now no one knows about this except for Apple and some security researchers. If the info gets leaked, then some might be in trouble. Writing about it here just increases the publicity, and hopefully, helps the iPhone software creators speed up the timeline.