You may think your iPhone is safe; that Apple's walled garden keeps the rampant viruses and malware from infiltrating your mobile operating system. But as Billy Lau, a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology, told attendees at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, your iPhone could be easily compromised up by simply plugging it into the wrong charger.
Lau explained that while no "arbitrary person" can install an application onto your iPhone, a virus like Mactan, which is contained inside a charging station that looks like a USB hub, can work around those particular safeguards to physically get into your operating system. "Mactans challenges the very fundamental security assumptions that people make," Lau had told attendees. "The attack is automatic; simply connecting the device is enough. It's stealthy. Even if the user looks at the screen there's no visible sign. And it can install malicious apps on the target device."
Once you plug your iPhone, the Universal Device ID (UDID) can be extracted just as long as the device doesn't have a passcode unlock. The Mactans then claims your device as a test subject with any validated Apple developer ID and you can't reject it since it doesn't ask for their permission or offer any visual evidence that there's anything going on in the background.
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