iPhone denial-of-service bug surfaces

Yaaaay, proper jailbreakme.com exploit for 1.1.3, here we come!

The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!!

Here we go again! IF you visit a site, and IF you puch the one key and the off button at the same time, and IF you stand on your head and shout "I'm the kinkg of the world"..... then someone might take over your iPhone.

Give us a site where this happens and tell us how many people have been affected by this or SHUT UP already!

We've seen this stuff on 24 of January, first time the bug was discovered. The only news is "security experts" somehow got their hands on a locked iPhone, patched it to 1.1.3 and confirmed the bug works there as well.

Just don't ask them why they couldn't provide a proof of concept exploit that is actually able to take over iPhone, not crash it.

Just exactly what kind of pages are "maliciously crafted" as if we didn't know! If you choose to trawl the underbelly of the internet you're bound to find something unpleasant. It's classic parental advice..."Stay on the well lit streets"! I'm guessing the material found on such web-sites looks pretty good on the iPhone's screen. Does touching work?

A denial of service is an ongoing attack that "denies service"; i.e. it prevents you from using something until the attack ceases. This does not do that, and it is therefore not a denial of service. It is a crash.

"DoS" may *sound* cool, but it shouldn't be applied willy-nilly.

This article is actually pretty straight forward; DOS bug that can cause your iPhone to crash when visiting a malicious site, currently un-patched. No hype. No sensationalism. We've seen worse reporting.

A denial of service is an ongoing attack that "denies service"; i.e. it prevents you from using something until the attack ceases. This does not do that, and it is therefore not a denial of service. It is a crash.

Actually, that's just one way to create a Denial of Service. By definition, a DOS attack/exploit is just that, an attack/exploit that makes the device unresponsive.

The classic way is to pound a system with network traffic so valid traffic is unable to get through. But you can also create a DOS scenario by causing a computer to eat up CPU cycles, or just crash the system. If you've ever had a runaway process that makes the whole system virtually unusable, that's a DOS (though it may not be an attack).

By crashing the phone (or computer, server, car, etc), you are, in affect, denying service of the device.