Do you have an iPhone? Be careful before picking up a cheap charger for your device. Security Researchers have built a custom iPhone charger that can be used to hack any iOS devices. This charger is called Mactans which is controlled by a Raspberry-Pi like computer BeagleBoard.
This new malicious charger has been developed by billy Lau, Yeongjin Jang and Chengyu Song and Chengyu Song from Georgia Institute of Technology. They will also demonstrate this charger in Black Hat 2013 Conference in July.
They claimed that infection caused by this malicious charger is persistent and hard to spot within device. They will also demonstrate how this charger will install malicious software in hidden mode in iOS device. This malicious app will hide itself in sale way Apple’s default app hide in the device.
“Despite the plethora of defense mechanisms in iOS, we successfully injected arbitrary software into current-generation Apple devices running the latest operating system (OS) software,” description of the researchers’ speech reads. All users are affected, as our approach requires neither a jailbroken device nor user interaction.”
This malicious charger can be used to hack any device running on Apple iOS platform. So, all available iPad and iPhone devices are vulnerable to this attack. Researchers also said that the development cost of this charger is too low so it can get huge popularity among spammers. The charger users $45 open-source hardware single-board computer.
They are not sharing too many details but they have already contacted Apple about their exploit.
