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Nearly two-fifths of robberies in London last year were for mobile phones
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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If you have physical access to a device you can eventually do whatever you want with it, depends how organised the thief is
Unless it's changed recently, you can wipe a user from it, but you cannot disable find my iphone, which will prevent initial activation with Apple.
And since it's a brick without being activated following a wipe, it would only be usable for parts.
I posted a link to an article in another reply, there is software available which can use whatever jailbreak exploit to remove the lock. Basically no device is 100% secure, so there will always be some way in if you have physical access and enough time on your hands.
You can’t jailbreak a phone without already obtaining full access to the device. So, unless people are jailbreaking their phones before giving them away, that is not a likely scenario. You also can’t use a phone that was wiped unless you first remove or have the credentials to the iCloud account associated with it. So, they could wipe the phone, and then it’s a brick. Only if they have the appleid password Can they wipe it and use it as new, and only if they have the Lock Screen passcode can they jailbreak it to wipe it via exploits.
That said, there are other tools and methods, the most common being transferring a known good serial number to a locked phone, and remote iCloud unlocks are available from China, using the official Apple unlock servers, so not a technical exploit, but a human one.
Aren't jailbreak exploits achieved by various means? i.e. if you're exploiting some unknown software bug it could come from any source, right? Either way, this totally legit software claims it can do it, and I'm sure there are plenty of less well-advertised hacks available too.
Jailbreaks are indeed achieved by various means, but every single one of them requires the phone to be unlocked. I used to own a repair shop, so I’m rather acquainted with the tricks. I’d say 95% of those “iCloud unlock” services are scams, and the rest of them use apples official servers to do so as I mentioned above.
I would be curious to learn more, as this is a much touted security feature. If it's that easy to bypass then we need to understand the limitations.
Do you have any more information on this?
Not an expert in any way, but I would assume it is similar to having physical access to a computer. You would not be able to get into the existing device or retrieve data, but if you have stolen it and just to use the device, there are numerous tools to allow side loading of new blobs, that will bypass any restrictions.
In theory this is true, in practice the protections Apple puts in place tend to put even games consoles to shame. That plus the quick turnaround of iPhone hardware means by the time it is cracked, it was already obselete
This is the first article I found (so I don't know how reliable the software is) but one suggestion is a tool that seems like it just jailbreaks the iPhone and can then remove the lock. So basically find an exploit that allows you to get round the protection.
The usual tactic is to send a phishing text to a number that calls it pretending to be Apple. They then get your Apple ID credentials and use that to unlock the device.
How do you send a phishing text to a phone you have stolen? The owner would either not get the text, or get it via iMessage which the response wouldn't appear on the stolen phone. I'm not following this tactic, so I'm obviously missing something.
The owner tries to call the number from another phone, usually a mobile. The hope is that the phone was misplaced and not stolen.
So the owner calls the phone, which is answered by the thief who pretends to be Apple?
Interesting.
They don't necessarily have to answer. They can just note the number that appears on-screen and text it later from a different device.
Usually the next step for the owner is to try get into their Apple ID to access the lost phone functions. That's where the texts come in.
As usual, people are the weakest link in security.
Exactly. The protections on the iPhone themselves are actually very strong for the time the phone released in. Unless you've got NSA-level hardware hackers in your org, this is by far your best bet.
Very much depends on your threat model. An iPhone is great if you trust Apple with the backdoor to your phone, if not then you're probably much more secure with GrapheneOS.
I mean yeah, obviously Apple isn't going to be able protect you much against a state-sponsored threat with their own private list of zero days, or Apple itself, but right now that's a small amount of people either are truly interested in fucking over.
https://yewtu.be/search?q=fpr+unlock+Android+13