If you have any particularly embarrassing or otherwise compromising photos on your iPhone you might want to think twice about how to keep them from being discovered by someone else. Simply deleting them might not be enough.
A vulnerability allowing hackers to access deleted photos and other files on the iPhone X was discovered by two researchers this week at the Pwn2Own hacking contest for finding iOS and Android bugs.
Richard Zhu and Amat Cama demoed the issue by connecting the iPhone X with iOS 12. 1 to a malicious Wi-Fi network and exploiting a vulnerability in a so-called just-in-time (JIT) compiler which is designed to help iPhones to perform certain tasks faster.
The couple could then retrieve a photo from the Photo app's Recently Deleted album where images are stored for 30 days after you delete them from the camera roll. This feature allows users to recover deleted photos should they have a change of mind. Through the same method other files processed by the JIT compiler could be accessed as well.
Zhu and Cama received a $50,000 reward for their findings and Apple has been informed of the bug. According to Forbes, the issue has yet to be fixed, though.
2018-11-17 18:38