A jailbreak for the latest iOS 7.1 update was discovered by researchers at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center this week.
As of now, it’s been difficult for hackers to jailbreak Apple’s latest smartphone software. The standard jailbreaking team, evad3rs, hasn’t had much success recently.
“Our work shows that software vendors must patch all publicly disclosed threats, as they may be exploited in other, equally disruptive attacks,” said Yeongjin Jang with the school, according to Phys.org.
The team carried out the jailbreak at the Black Hat USA conference.
“We start by finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities with incomplete patches,” said Tielei Wang, another team member. “Then, we use those vulnerabilities to discover new avenues of attack. We'll detail these vulnerabilities and the exploit techniques that we developed.”
It’s unclear if it will be released to the public.
However, the Chinese Pangu team accomplished jailbreaking the iOS 7 a few weeks ago. Evad3rs still doesn’t have one out yet.
According to a well-known hacker, Stefan Esser, wrote that Pangu stole his work about a month ago. The jailbreak, he tweeted, has “malware from China.”
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The Associated Press update for tech:
Samsung profit falls as smartphone sales slow
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Samsung Electronics Co. reported a bigger-than-expected fall in second quarter profit on Thursday and said it was uncertain if earnings from its handset business would improve in the current quarter.
Samsung warned earlier this month that the second quarter would be its worst in two years as rapid growth in smartphone sales had faded. The company particularly struggled to compete in cheap smartphones, currently the fastest growing part of the global smartphone business. Samsung shares dived 4 percent in Seoul.
Its net income for the April-June quarter dropped 20 percent to 6.3 trillion won ($6.1 billion) from 7.8 trillion won a year earlier. That was the lowest since the second quarter of 2012. Analysts surveyed by FactSet forecast 6.5 trillion won income.
Sales fell 9 percent to 52.4 trillion won while operating profit sank 25 percent to 7.2 trillion won, in line with Samsung’s guidance earlier this month.
Robert Yi, head of investor relations, told a conference call that Samsung had higher marketing expenses as competition increased in mid- to low-end smartphones and because it tried to clear old inventory before the release of updated smartphone models in the fall. Tablet computer sales also fell, he said, citing weak overall demand.
Samsung sold 95 million mobile handsets in the quarter and smartphones were close to 80 percent of those sales, Yi said. It sold 8 million tablet PCs.
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