iMessage Subject Of Developers DoS attack
It has been reported recently and on various occasion and by more than just one source that an iMessage DoS virus leading to the crash of the iMessage app has been experienced. This is the latest “news” hitting the jailbreaking community over the last week and the hit has been manifested by ta few spam messages that practically deny the ensuring of service.
Among those experiencing these attacks we can mention iH8sn0w (whom you might know as the developer of SnowBreeze) and even Chpwn who has created Zephyr and many more. In what concerns the one in charge with the spreading of this spam message we have to correlate it to an account on Twitter associated to being in charge with sales of provisioned UDIDs and Siri proxy servers.
Going further into the actual spam messages, Matther Panzarion from The Next Web states that they are apparently sent out with the help of a basic AppleScript and that they are sent out through the OS X Messages application. What happens is that once sent out they managed to stock the iOS or Mac Messages application immediately with texts, therefore the owner becomes obliges to check out his messages and notification boxes on a constant basis and the go ahead with clearing them out. If it happens that the respective spams are so big, then the entire Messages app applicable on the iOS can become entirely blocked, hence this translates into an actual blocking of the service (or in a more professional language – a DoS). But it seems that this is not the case right now. In other cases the texts can indeed be very large, however they might not really lead to the ultimate crashing of the application. What they do however is to restrict you in using it, so there are inconveniences again in what concerns your experience with this app. It however becomes a lot more serious when the app gets closed down as a direct consequence of a more intrinsic string, so this is what we should be looking out for.
This creator of the prank has developed it up to the most small details it seems – and we are therefore speaking of a particular script especially created for Apple which shall very easily send out a lot of iMessages addressed to a particular owner, and all of these messages hold unicodes and a series of other features too that are pretty hard to shut down – which shall ultimately lead to a crash of this applications. It can actually be a final one too, because it is not very easy in that respect for the app to simply do the loading of the texts it receives.
It is still not clear who is behind this, but apparently he wants his deed to be acknowledged so he has recently begun to contact iH8sn0w and insisted that he belonged to a team of developers (whose identity he would not give out). Ryan Petrich however was not satisfied with this answer so he soon started to look into the matter more thoroughly and therefore come up with a series of info that I am sure you’re curious in knowing, so we shall share them with you. It seems that prior to changing to the actual anonymous account, the prankster sent out his original spamming messages via @is1ri.
And now that this issue came up it starts being more obvious that when it comes to keeping an eye on spam attacks for the iMessage app, Apple doesn’t really do a good job and focuses on preventing this type of actions from happening – and this might be translated into an invitation for upcoming spamming options too. If you want to get rid of this problem right now, then you only have one solution – and that stands in the disabling of the iMessage account which has been corrupted by the attack.
Apple should at this stage be aware of the issue – as Panzarino claims he has informed them on it, however no feedback on it has been reported back. What he expects is that they might look into the possibility of blocking specific users – or perhaps adding a setting similar to a white list, which should at least keep the issue under control if not stop it for good. We don’t really want it to take even bigger proportions.
The iMessages has been released back in 2011 when Apple made it available for the iOS 5 and applicable on the iPad, iPod Touch and even the iPhone, and then, one year after – it has also become supported by the Mac OSX. Along the years it has come to be a tool used by a high number of users to communicate via more than 2 billion of texts on a daily basis – this is what Tim Cook has reported at the beginning of the year.
Keep an eye on us and hopefully we can report a solution to this whole issue.
