If you receive a text message with a single square character, you are advised to immediately turn off your iPhone, as they warn it means that someone has utilized a bug to take over your iPhone.  At least this is what they are talking about at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.

“This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone,” said cybersecurity researcher Charles Miller. “Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this.”

Experts Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner say they’ve discovered a bug in the iPhone’s approach to SMS that exposes it completely to remote control through a subsequent hack, including the camera, dialer, messaging and Safari. It could compromise every iPhone released to date!  Regardless of hardware revision or which version of the iPhone OS is running.

The technique involves sending only one unusual text character or else a series of “invisible” messages that confuse the phone and open the door to attack. Because users won’t know whose messages to block in advance, there’s little iPhone owners can do but to shut off the phone immediately if they suspect they’re at risk — a real problem as the trick could also be used to make an iPhone send more messages of its own.

Why would they do that? Simply to show Apple how vulnerable this iPhone bug really is. Apparently, the hackers notified Apple about a month ago, but Apple didn’t bother responding to them.  They plan to reveal the still unpatched iPhone bug this Thursday at the conference.

Chances you receive such a SMS are pretty slim, but you never know…

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