Your iPhone chimes.  A new text message has arrived.  You glance down and see only a single square character in the message.  sorry, folks.  It may already be too late for you.  All you can do is immediately shut off your device, put it away, and hope for the best.

Apparently, it seems, there is a security glitch in the iPhone, which leaves it vulnerable to attacks via SMS messages.  According to the report in Forbes Magazine:

That small cipher will likely be your only warning that someone has taken advantage of a bug that [Charlie[] Miller and his fellow cybersecurity researcher Collin Mulliner plan to publicize Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Using a flaw they’ve found in the iPhone’s handling of text messages, the researchers say they’ll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone’s functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device’s camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.

Wow.  Just wow.  Mass gadget hijacking…coming to the iTunes App Store starting today.  I certainly hope that none of our readers have been affected by this glitch, though I cannot say that Apple shares my sentiment.  They have apparently known about this glitch for over a month, and have made virtually no comment, let alone offered any kind of security patch to cover this problem.  As my good friend, Patrick, said over at Just Another iPhone Blog earlier today:

It’s one thing not to comment on the zillions of device rumors that float around each year in ‘iPhone season’ – it’s quite another to have horrifically bad communication with apps developers and to keep silent on a critical security concern like this one.  Users deserve both a quick patch and some proper answers addressing this subject.

This is like a double whammy for iPhone users.  A disastrous security hole, coupled with a complete lack of response from Apple.  Have any of you been affected by this glitch?  Let us know your experiences in the comments.

UPDATE: It looks like Apple issued a fix for this bug with iPhone OS 3.0.1, which is available for download today from iTunes.  [via Engadget]

[image credit: pocketpicks]

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