How hackers are using a terrifyingly cunning trick to crack your iPhone and ruin your life
Get the lowdown on the only way to protect yourself from a scam that's otherwise IMPOSSIBLE to avoid
Normally, receiving a picture message from a friend, acquaintance or lover is a cause for celebration.
But those apparently innocent (or sinful) images could actually be your downfall, because scammers have devised a way of using them to crack into victims' iPhones and steal some of their incredibly valuable data.
Worst of all, this attack is more or less impossible to avoid unless you follow one very important piece of advice.
“This is a very high severity issue,”
“The fact that you have an exploit [attack] without any user interaction makes me very concerned,” he told Fortune.
All cyber-scammers need to do to ruin your day is send an infected picture in the TIFF format - a common type of image file.
You don't even need to open up this danger photo for it to go on to work on your phone, meaning that there's only a single way of reliably protecting yourself from it.
“An attacker could send a thousand iMessages to victims and the second they turn their phones on they’re infected,” Williams added.
Once it's taken hold of your phone, the vicious virus can steal information from web browsers such as Safari, potentially allowing hackers into your email account where they can try to steal banking details and then bleed you dry.
The nasty piece of "malware" can also infect the Apple Watch and Macbook laptops or iMac desktops, although the photo would need to be opened in order to do its dirty work.
How to protect yourself
This is quite simple really.
Apple is famous for fixing"security holes" as soon as they are highlighted.
It has released an update to iOS, the operating system which powers iPhones and iPads.
Just update your iPhone () and you'll be safe, for now.
Whilst you're at, you should probably update every iGadget, just in case.
An Apple update a day keeps the hackers at bay.
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