iPhone Likely Target of Hacks in 2008

Study: iPhone Major 2008 Hack Target:

The attacks, they say, will likely take the form of malware embedded in photos or video. Until its latest update, the iPhone was vulnerable to such attacks through a bug in its handling of TIFF images. Previous versions of Apple’s firmware used a version of the libtiff library that was susceptible to buffer-overflow attacks.

Security researcher and hacker HD Moore in October revealed that the TIFF exploit would allow malicious hackers access to the phone’s root level. All of the iPhone’s key applications run as root processes, Moore found, so exploiting the TIFF bug provided the ability for hackers to take control of the phone.