A young man from Arizona, USA, was arrested the other day after creating a type of malware for iPhone which forces the terminals to automatically call the 911 emergency service. More precisely, it created a malware that takes advantage of an existing bug in the iOS operating system, its access generating the automatic and multiple calls of 911.
According to the police, the center for emergency situations received over 100 calls in just a few minutes from users who accessed a malicious link distributed via Twitter. by the arrested young man. The large number of calls made it difficult for the police officers who could not respond to real problems because they were bombarded with false calls.
Investigating the problem, detectives from Peoria and Maricopa County discovered that everything is based on a malicious JavaScript code created for iOS and distributed on Twitter. Users who accessed that link confirmed on Twitter that their terminals started calling 911 on their own, some even 19 times.
Asked by the police why he exploited this bug, the young man said that he was only distributing what he thought was an exploit that did not harm anyone and that he was very amused by seeing the problems of the affected users. Separate from that exploit, he had another one ready that not only forced the 911 call, but also blocked and then restarted the affected terminals.
All this fun of the young man brings him a criminal investigation and accusation for committing three crimes, and the smallest punishment he will receive is a fine of several thousand dollars, although he risks going to prison.
"The Peoria Police Department and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office also received a large volume of these repeated 911 hang up calls and had the potential danger of losing service throughout Maricopa County. It was also discovered that agencies in California and Texas were affected at their respective 911 systems by this bug. Meet claimed that his intention was to make a non-harmful, but annoying bug that he believed was 'funny.'
