[I want the USA back]

And programmers are going to be trusted to write software to control airplanes in flight, trucks on the highway, drones, and robots.

[Swordmaker]

Last October's exploit that caused iPhones to repeatedly dial 911 reveals grave cybersecurity threat, say experts. Creator of this exploit says he accidentally posted the 911 call version instead of a version that would merely freeze the iPhone in an attempt to win an Apple bug bounty. Oops. He is under a felony indictment. Apple says it will be releasing a fix ASAP. . . this all happened in October so it is unclear if this has already been fixed or not from the article. . . I think it has been fixed IIRC. This is a warning article about the actual extent of the effect the use of such an exploit might have on the 911 system. — PING!

Apple iPhone Exploit Potential Warning
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[rlmorel]

Meetkumar Desai.

For God’s sake.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Good to see Apple is Johnny-in-the-spot and getting a correction out. /s

[mad_as_he$$]

Guess what. In a real emergency 911 is overloaded and useless any way. How many idiots call to say they just felt an earthquake? More than a few.

[Swordmaker]

It was initially thought that a few hundred calls were generated in a short time, but investigators now believe that one tweeted link that activated the exploit was clicked on 117,502 times, each click triggering a 911 call. The WSJ reports that law-enforcement officials and 911 experts fear that a targeted attack using the same technique could prove devastating …

The above quotation from the article is, on its face, false to fact. Why? Because there is zero evidence that all 117,502 clicks ever caused 911 calls because there is zero evidence of how many of those 117,502 clicks on the tweet were made by iPhone users, the only ones that would result in a 911 call or the loop. Secondly, the tweet was posted in the Middle East. . . and would have also been read in Europe where the emergency number is 999, not 911, so the triggered script would have resulted in a null response.

In my opinion, the original numbers reported back in October are most likely accurate instead of these new assumed number which illogically are based on the total number of clicks on the Tweet.

The fact is that total number of devices which received the Tweet would normally include Android, Windows, Macs, iPhone and other iOS devices where only the minority iPhone devices would or could generate the 911 calls. The other devices would and could not generate the calls because at this point in time, the other devices did not have this vulnerability combined with a phone capability. These other devices would still have been capable of receiving the Tweet and clicking the link. Receiving the Tweet was NOT specific for iPhones.

[Zathras]

This is one of the reasons Apple does a code review on apps posted on itunes.
Cell phones...even iPhones are the biggest security problem on the internet.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Ben Lovejoy

NHL Defenseman and Tech Blogger.
A true Renaissance Man.

[minnesota_bound]

iPhones also turn on your wifi connection on your laptop.
It is called instant hotspot. Very annoying as it causes connection issues with Outlook and our database as Windows is switching back and forth between wifi and a wired connection causing disconnects for our database. We turn off the wifi and the iPhone turns it back on in a few minutes.