Is The New iPhone Jailbreak Worth It?

It’s been reported nurmorous times over the week, that the jailbreak released for the iPhone via the mobile Safari browser, posted by the iPhone Dev Team at Jailbreakme.com, is causing many issues.

Since the jailbreak can be performed just through Safari, it means potentially anyone could control your iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) just by visiting a certain Web page. A site can present the exploit as a simple PDF link, which requires no explicit user action short of clicking a link. It can then launch an exploit that takes advantage of the way the PDF viewer loads fonts.

As a result, the program can then have unrestricted access to your all of your internet enabled iDevices on all versions of iOS firmware. There are a few exploits and vulnerabilities. The first, is in the way the browser separates PDF files, enabling the code to get inside a protective sandbox (which is one of the iPhones many layers of defenses), and the other hole allows code to break out of the sandbox and get control privileges on the device.

“Vulnerabilities with reliable exploit code tend to get reused and repurposed for other attacks/malware/uses,” David Marcus, security research and communications manager at McAfee, wrote in a blog post. “This should serve as a wake-up call for anyone with a mobile device: remote exploitation is real and here to stay,” he wrote.