A German cybersecurity expert claims to have discovered a security flaw that leaves Apple device owners' emails exposed to the malicious intent of hackers.
As money.cnn.com notes, citing the German expert, this security gap is significant and concerns more owners of older iPhone and iPad devices.
Ever since Apple devices started running iOS 4 in 2010, the company has been reassuring its customers that their files are protected by an extra safety net, which ensures that when the phone is locked, the email attachments are also locked. This is so that if the phone is stolen, the thief cannot access these files. Specifically, these files should appear as letters and numbers that make no sense to each other.
However, according to Kertz, this is not the case. The files are not encrypted in this way, and in fact, hackers can extract them even if the phone is locked by connecting it to a computer and using password-bypassing software.
As he says, the problem was also detected on an iPhone 5s and an iPad 2 running iOS 7.0.4. "I pointed these findings out to Apple. They responded that they were aware of the issue, but did not give a date for when a fix is expected. Considering the long time that iOS 7 has been available and the sensitivity of the attachments that many enterprises keep on their devices (based on data protection), I expected a patch soon," he writes.
