Today a government agency in Germany, the Federal Office for Information Security, published a press release warning iPhone owners about 2 "critical" vulnerabilities in iOS, for which there is still no patch to cover them. The release of course refers to the new jailbreak solution published yesterday and how it exploits the operating system to obtain root access. The government agency warns users not to open PDF documents on terminals and not to visit unknown websites because there is a chance of being infected, and hackers could have access to personal information/credit card details/emails/etc. For those without jailbreak, there is no protection method against this vulnerability, but for those with jailbreak there is PDF Loading Warner.
The vulnerability is available for iOS 3.1.2 – 4.0.1 but can probably be implemented to work even on iOS 3.0 – 3.1, so be very careful. The situation becomes quite difficult for Apple considering that a government agency of a European state where Apple sells many products is issuing warnings about iOS vulnerabilities. I suspect that these days we will see an update for iOS, an update that will probably block both the jailbreak and probably the decoding.
