It turns out that hackers now have a way of taking control of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch if you download certain PDFs. Once these hackers have control of your device they can then cause all types of problems and steal information. It wasn’t long ago that Apple was boasting about how secure their devices are, but it now seems that there is a hole in their security and hackers are now exploiting it. To make matters worse there is not anti-virus software to use on these devices and this makes them even more vulnerable.
The program that gives hackers the ability to completely control your device can be passed easily via a PDF download. Apparently the virus itself is located within the fonts function within the PDF; the program then causes a stack overflow where it uses up too much memory. The fact that the stack overflow has occurred means that the hackers are then able to get past the phone’s defences. At the very least such an attack can critically damage your iPhone or iPad.
The way to avoid becoming a victim of this hack is to not download any PDFs unless you are completely sure of the source. Hopefully it won’t take Apple long to fix this breach in their security, but it is a warning that we should always be on our guard. Most of these attacks occur because we have allowed our own guard down; we have clicked on a link we weren’t sure about or downloaded something dodgy. It is just so easy to forget to be careful, but this is what we need to do if we want to prevent becoming the victim of hackers. The big names like Apple do their best, but there will always be security breaches.
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