When Apple released iOS 17.2 on Monday, December 11, it had plenty to recommend it. You can read a full rundown of its new features, including the much-anticipated Journal app, here on Forbes. And check out my guide to whether you should upgrade to it or not, here. And now, it turns out there’s another feature in the update—and it’s definitely worth having as it could prevent your iPhone from being hacked in public.
Have you ever heard of the Flipper Zero? No? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s an electronic tool, which ZDNet described like this: “It’s a $169 multifunctional device that can interact with digital interfaces in the physical world. It can emulate RFID and NFC cards, analyze radio protocols, imitate remote controls, and much more. It’s like a “digital Swiss Army knife” for cybersecurity enthusiasts, tinkerers, and those interested in exploring the digital side of their environment.”
It’s a pentesting tool, which is not something to make sure your Montblanc is writing smoothly.No, a pen test is short for penetration test and it means a simulated attack on a computer system to judge its security.
There’s some firmware for the Flipper Zero, called Xtreme, which meant it could spam iPhones some distance away. The device could flood the iPhone with Bluetooth connection notifications at such a rate that the iPhone freezes and needs to be rebooted. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet explains: “Using the built-in BLE Spam app, the Flipper Zero could cause a flurry of popups to appear on an iPhone, eventually resulting in iOS locking up. Put another way, it could perform a denial of service (DoS) attack on any and all iPhones within a 30-foot radius of the attacker.”
If that’s got you worried about using your iPhone in a public place, you’d be right to be cautious. As 9to5Mac reports, “Threat actors have reportedly used malicious Flipper Zero devices to pull off undetected DoS attacks on trains, coffee shops, and concert venues.”
However, the good news is the panic is now over for users with iOS 17.2. It looks like Apple has devised a way to defeat the problem, putting “a mechanism in place to prevent popups flooding the device,” Kingsley-Hughes says. “While a few popups do still appear, which is annoying and could cause some users confusion, the neverending stream that would deluge the iPhone has been cut off.”
This means that this unpleasant hack won’t touch the iPhone now, providing you’ve updated to iOS 17.2, which is available for all iPhones from 2018 and later, that is iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and the following series: iPhone 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone 14 and iPhone 15, plus the second-and third-generation iPhone SE.
True, the chances of being near a Flipper Zero operated by a malicious user are slim. But now, the threat has been eliminated, it seems.