No iOS Zone WiFi attack

No iOS Zone WiFi attack.

Imagine this – crossing the street or sitting in a moving taxi and suddenly your phone or iPad reboots. You’re puzzled and annoyed, particularly since you may have been on the phone to a client or friend, perhaps in the middle of writing a long text message.

So you wait for the phone (or iPad) to finish the reboot process. And then it does it again. And again. Right now, you’re beyond annoyed. Almost in throw-the-phone-at-the-wall territory.

The guy standing next to you is chatting away happily, but ten feet away, there’s another person looking just like you – crazy annoyed. You look further afield and notice similar situations. Some oblivious, others in the same state as you.

Eventually logic takes over and you try and group the affected and non affected into two groups. It doesn’t take long to work out that the ones with the problem are using iPhones, and the happy ones are using something else.

What’s the problem?

It’s probably likely that you’ve got WiFi turned on, and just as likely that you’ve enabled your phone to use an available network without asking you to choose one. (Otherwise you’d be bombarded with requests to join a network, right?).

You’ve been attacked by the’No iOS Zone’ hack. The ‘No iOS Zone’ WiFi attack uses a tailored SSL Certificate which is usually employed to establish a secure connection to trigger a bug in the operating system to crash any application using Secure Socket Layers (SSL).

But there’s more: The ‘No iOS Zone’ attack combined with another known error called ‘WiFiGate’ can cause an iOS device to automatically connect to a specific WiFi network. Join those two ideas together and you’ve got potential for Denial of Service.

Think about that for a moment. Any app that uses SSL. Social media, messaging, e-commerce, email… the list goes on. If the operating system(iOS) keeps getting hammered, it could even get into a Denial of Service (DoS) situation and continually sit in a crash-loop.

Here’s the thing – you can’t get into your phone settings to turn off the WiFi because it just keeps crashing.

Imagine a hight density area where no-one (except the Android users) can get onto WiFi?

The Solution:

Get back in the taxi or simply move away far enough to be out of WiFi range.
Otherwise known as ‘Run Away’.
Turn your phone off and on.
If you’re planning on having to remain in the No iOS Zone for a while, then turn off your WiFi before returning.

Apple’s take on the No iOS Zone attack:

They’re aware of it and onto it.

Some interesting links about the ‘No iOS Zone’ attack:

There is a hidden benefit:

People might actually start talking to each other rather than texting, social-media posting etc. Wouldn’t that be nice!

No iOS Zone WiFi attack