By Costin Raiu
When iPhone jailbreaking was declared legal earlier this year, Apple fans from all around the world rejoiced. Sites such as Jailbreakme.com, which allowed for the simple and straightforward jailbreaking of older iPhones, became very popular.
Indeed, the keyword here is “older” because when Apple started selling the new iPhone 4G, it also patched the vulnerabilities that were exploited in the drive-by jailbreak.
This is why newly purchased iPhones that come with iOS 4.0.2 or iOS 4.1 cannot be jailbroken. At least, it was impossible until now.
Earlier this month, a hacker going by the handle “pod2g” announced that by he is working on a new exploit that would allow the jailbreaking of all existing iPhones through a vulnerability in the bootrom. Due to its nature, this will be extremely hard for Apple to fix in software, if not impossible at all. This means it will be possible to jailbreak all existing iPhones and iPads through a simple exploit, regardless of the OS version of their own hardware. This is indeed a groundbreaking announcement.
However, as of September 20, there is no exploit available from “pod2g” to jailbreak iOS 4.0.2 and iOS 4.1. Users of iPhone 4G’s with these versions of iOS are pretty much unable to do anything, unless they downgrade the OS to an earlier version.
Interestingly, it is impossible to downgrade iPhones that came with 4.0.2 from the factory.
Cyber-criminals are now keen to take advantage of this phenomenon, releasing fake “Greenpois0n” trojans – which is the presumable name of the new jailbreaking tool which is to be released any day now.
Users searching for the Greenpois0n tool on Google or popular torrent sites, might be in for a surpise:
All the existing “greenpois0n” archives at the moment contain Trojans, designed to steal passwords and other private data from computer systems.
In addition to that, fake (rogue) jailbreaking websites have appeared that pretend to be selling tools that can jailbreak any version of iPhone with any version of iOS. The average cost for these is $25 – $40.
As usual, don’t be fooled by these Trojans and keep in mind that there is currently no working jailbreaking tool for iPhone 4’s running iOS 4.0.2 / 4.1.
If the “pod2g” exploit turns out to be valid, that will no doubt be announced widely. Until then, stay away of the fake jailbreaking tools and web sites.
