Monday, February 15, 2010

Apple drops the ban hammer on iPhone hackers


No doubt Apple is leery of having its iPhone OS so easily and frequently hacked (its notoriously weak security being one of the many reasons the iPhone has yet to really take off in the corporate world), but Cupertino’s latest security precaution isn’t likely to win any favor. Just days after a scrappy young iPhone hacked discovered an unlock exploit for OS 3.1.3 baseband 05.12.01, Sherif Hashim received an ominous message on his iPhone after attempting to log into iTunes: “This Apple ID has been disabled for security reasons.” Proving that this is not an isolated incident, fellow hacker iH8sn0w responded to Hashim to let him know the very same thing happened to him after he released an exploit known as XEMN. Perhaps most puzzlingly, however, is the fact that Hasim’s exploit was never publicly released having only been given to the iPhone Dev-Team who plan to incorporate it into their next release. Obviously Apple could claim that its actions were in response to the violation of their intellectual property as well as a breach of the iPhone’s end-user license agreement, but one has to wonder just how far a notoriously heavy-handed company like Apple might go in the future if it is unable to gain the upper hand over hackers like Hashim.

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