Apple denies knowledge of NSA’s iPhone backdoor

Yesterday, it was revelaed that the NSA has a backdoor into iOS that allows the agency to intercept text messages, address book entires and more. Apple has today issued a statement that denies knowledge of any such backdoor. Apple’s statement to AllThingsD reads: Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements. Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple’s industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them. NSA’s backdoor requires physical device access to install a program called DROPOUTJEEP. The program, NSA claims, has a 100 percent success rate to push/pull files from a device, download SMS messages, get location data, turn on the mic/camera and more. What raised concerns was that this exploit being used by the NSA with “100 percent success rate” hasn’t been fixed till now. Apple’s statement hints that along with a number of evasi0n7 related exploits, Apple will also kill the vulnerabilities being used by the NSA. You can read more about NSA’s backdoor here. Continue reading →

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