i heart mary

For all iPhone owners, beware. There is talk about hackers being able to take over your iPhone by a single malicious text message. According to security researchers, the iPhone is vulnerable to hackers because of a “serious memory corruption bug”. Watch out for any text messages with squares; it could possibly be a hacker trying to take control of your device, if not a friend trying to prank you. At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, security experts Collin Mulliner and Charlie Miller demonstrated how easily an iPhone can be taken over by another party.

Elinor Mills from CNet describes what happened when the experts demonstrated on her iPhone: “While I was talking on the phone to Charlie Miller, his partner, Collin Mulliner, sent me a text message from his phone. One minute I’m talking to Miller and the next minute my phone is dead, and this time it’s not AT&T’s fault. After a few seconds it came back to life, but I was not able to make or receive calls until I rebooted.”

At that very moment, hackers are able to exploit the hole to do basically anything they want with your device, according to the researchers.

Apple was informed about the flaw over a month ago and is currently working on fixing the problem, but will probably take some time to be able to patch up the vulnerabilities. In the meantime, iPhone owners should probably keep their eyes and ears open for every text they receive. I know I will…