14 DAY TRIAL // Cyber-criminals taking advantage of the hype surrounding jailbreaking iOS 4.1, releasing fake "Greenpois0n", the name of a purported new jailbreak tool which, in fact, contains a trojan tasked with stealing passwords.
Costin Raiu, Kaspersky's chief security expert for the EEMEA region, has issued a warning to all those who might be interested in jailbreaking their iDevices, saying that multiple sources purporting to offer jailbreak tools for iOS 4.1 are, in fact, malicious.
“When iPhone jailbreaking was declared legal earlier this year, Apple fans from all around the world rejoiced,” Raiu begins his post. “Sites such as Jailbreakme.com, which allowed for the simple and straightforward jailbreaking of older iPhones, became very popular.”
“Earlier this month, a hacker going by the handle ‘pod2g’ announced that by he is working on a new exploit that would allow the jailbreaking of all existing iPhones through a vulnerability in the bootrom,” Raiu writes,
The security expert explains that, “Due to its nature, this will be extremely hard for Apple to fix in software, if not impossible at all,” referring to the fact that bootrom exploits can only be fixed by altering the hardware.
Raiu agrees that the announcement was, indeed, groundbreaking.
And while this paves the way for multiple future jailbreaks, the security guy warns that “Cyber-criminals are now keen to take advantage of this phenomenon, releasing fake ‘Greenpois0n’ trojans - which is the presumable name of the new jailbreaking tool which is to be released any day now.”
He notes that “Users searching for the Greenpois0n tool on Google or popular torrent sites, might be in for a surprise,” that being - “All the existing ‘greenpois0n’ archives at the moment contain Trojans, designed to steal passwords and other private data from computer systems,” Raiu says.
He also warns that fake jailbreaking websites have also emerged, claiming to be selling tools that can jailbreak any version of iPhone with any version of iOS.
Softpedia (for its part) would like to note that the only trusted source of jailbreak tools, at the moment, is The iPhone Dev Team, which are yet to make an announcement regarding a stable jailbreak tool leveraging the exploit in question.
We, however, don't encourage jailbreaking.
Nonetheless, the Team did announce this week that an update to their redsn0w tool can do some fairly good jailbreaking for a limited number of devices.
But the warning remains in place: “don't be fooled by these Trojans and keep in mind that there is currently no working jailbreaking tool for iPhone 4's running iOS 4.0.2 / 4.1,” Raiu adds.
“If the ‘pod2g’ exploit turns out to be valid, that will no doubt be announced widely. Until then, stay away of the fake jailbreaking tools and web sites,” he concludes his post.