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July 17, 2007
After the iPhone Hype, the Scares
This is one of the worst headlines ever:
"Malware problem on the iPhone is getting worse"
Jeepers! There's a malware problem on the iPhone? And it's getting worse?
Well ... no.
If you choose to read that article and lose two minutes of your life that you'll never get back, you'll learn there's a new trojan that hijacks attempts to visit the official iPhone site from a Windows PC and harvests credit card information. It passes that information along to bad people. It also causes browser popups advertising the iPhone to appear, just in case the infected machine's owner isn't really interested in buying one and perhaps needs some nudging.
So, the "malware problem" here isn't quite with the iPhone. In fact, to be susceptible to this problem you pretty much have to not own an iPhone at all.
If you're curious about any real iPhone dangers, SPI says the iPhone's Web dialer could be subverted. So there's one. That's earned a ho-hum from other researchers, but at least it's arguably an iPhone problem. Not a "Windows users rendered unable to resist pretty consumer electronics then falling victim to their own computer's bad security" problem.
Posted by mhall at 3:17 PM | Add Comment
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