WARNING: January 1st 1970 Bug Can Be Used to Remotely Brick iPhones [Video]

POST

MAIL

Posted April 13, 2016 at 5:08pm by Shalom Levytam

Security researchers have discovered that the January 1st, 1970 bug can be used to remote brick iPhones and iPads.

Patrick Kelley and Matt Harrigan managed to automate the exploitation of the date bug that bricked many iPhones back in February, armed with only $120 of electronics, a basic understanding of networking, and a familiarity with the way Apple devices connect to wireless networks.

Using a custom Raspberry Pi setup built by Kelley, a wifi access point resembling a commonly trusted network spoofs Apple’s NTP servers to pass the 1/1/1970 date to the device. This starts a chain reaction of software instability resulting in a observed temperatures up to 54°C… which is hot enough to brick a device.

This issue has been fixed with the release of iOS 9.3.1. You can find download links for the new firmware here.

Take a look at the video below to see the attack in action...

WARNING: January 1st 1970 Bug Can Be Used to Remotely Brick iPhones [Video]

Follow iClarified

joshWUa - April 13, 2016 at 11:47pm

Tried it on mine and nothing happened.

Kg - April 13, 2016 at 6:36pm

Would be interesting to load this up in an Apple Store. Most of the devices out of the box are on older firmware...

odedoo1 - April 13, 2016 at 5:18pm

How is this different from the original reports about the January 1st, 1970 bug?

Chris - April 13, 2016 at 5:53pm

Because now they've discovered that they can do it remotely, which is way worse than when they first discussed the bug.

AverageReviewer - April 13, 2016 at 5:12pm

Yeah unless you just update your phone. Do that and you should be fine.

Chris - April 13, 2016 at 5:54pm

I don't want to update. I like my customization from my jailbreak.

Nitro Junkie - April 13, 2016 at 6:02pm

Exactly. Not everyone updates their phones with every update. One reason being jailbreaks. Another safe thing is to not connect to wifi networks you don't know or trust. It's as simple as that.