Malware Alert: update your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch to iOS 9.3.5 right now

Scary iPhone malware that steals your data is a reminder no platform is ever safe
By Raymond Wong
August 26, 2016

If you haven't done so already, go and update your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to iOS 9.3.5 right now. To update, go to Settings > General > Software Update.

It may not seem urgent because it's only a "point release," but the update is crucial or you risk having all of your data secretly stolen by invisible malware that can install itself on your device and even uninstall itself without leaving any traces behind.

Two reports from the New York Times and Motherboard published on Thursday detail how three major security holes, patched via the update, could be exploited by hackers to track and steal practically all of the private data on your iOS device.

The very idea of having all your data stolen without any real effort should scare everyone into updating their iOS devices.

Motherboard: Government Hackers Caught Using Unprecedented iPhone Spy Tool
Written by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
August 25, 2016 // 01:05 PM EST

Until this month, no one had seen an attempted spyware infection leveraging three unknown bugs, or zero-days, in the iPhone. The tools and technology needed for such an attack, which is essentially a remote jailbreak of the iPhone, can be worth as much as one million dollars. After the researchers alerted Apple, the company worked quickly to fix them in an update released on Thursday.

The researchers at Citizen Lab and Lookout were impressed by this new, never-seen-before, type of malware.

“We realized that we were looking at something that no one had ever seen in the wild before. Literally a click on a link to jailbreak an iPhone in one step,” Murray told Motherboard. “One of the most sophisticated pieces of cyberespionage software we’ve ever seen.”

“It basically steals all the information on your phone, it intercepts every call, it intercepts every text message, it steals all the emails, the contacts, the FaceTime calls. It also basically backdoors every communications mechanism you have on the phone,” Murray explained. “It steals all the information in the Gmail app, all the Facebook messages, all the Facebook information, your Facebook contacts, everything from Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Telegram—you name it.”