Security News

New major releases of an operating system always bring with them a few unexpected wrinkles to be ironed out. Yesterday’s speedy discovery of a lockscreen bypass flaw being a case in point. And now, a Polish researcher has posted a blog including video demonstrating how the “Emergency Call” screen can be used to call any number.

While iOS 7 includes all kinds of nifty features that improve security of lost or stolen devices, unfortunately it seems to have a lot of bugs that would allow thieves all sorts of access to the phone without actually having to get into the device. (Whoops!) Interesting that a few months back, Apple gave a group of experts an iPhone 5 with iOS 7 for testing purposes, to try to bypass Activation Lock. Looks like lockscreen and “emergency call” flaws were omitted from that testing.

There’s no mitigation for this bypass at this time, but hopefully Apple will release an update to address this soon.