I was browsing the web and noted that a lot of blogs and news sites have posting on the iphone virus and iphone hacking topic. I was intrigued so I did some researching and some connecting of the dots: this week is Black Hat Security Conference week and somebody must have demo’d some iphone hacking stuffs. My guess was right 🙂 quoting Cnet News

LAS VEGAS–Researchers have discovered a way to take complete control over an iPhone merely by sending special SMS messages and demonstrated it on my iPhone at the Black Hat security conference on Wednesday.

Although an attacker could exploit the hole to make calls, steal data, send text messages, and do basically anything that I can do with my iPhone, the researchers were kind and merely rendered it temporarily inoperable.

Here’s what happened: While I was talking on the phone to Charlie Miller, his partner, Collin Mulliner, sent me a text message from his phone. One minute I’m talking to Miller and the next minute my phone is dead, and this time it’s not AT&T’s fault. After a few seconds it came back to life, but I was not able to make or receive calls until I rebooted.

The name Charlie Miller rings a bell. Yup the same guy in the  Safari hack/Pwn2own early this year 🙂

Researching deeper into this topic, it seems that as of posting this article there is NO actual malware or virus exploiting this bug (yet). But what is alarming (but is not surprising for many) is that the vendor (in this case Apple) have not released a patch yet, even if the researchers have reported the bug for more than a month already.
Some media sources seemed to have “hyped” this development in Black Hat Conference and inferred to that an iphone virus will be launched on July 30. Not the first time that this kind of issues get hyped 🙁

Anyway, I will be on the lookout for new developments on this issue and if there is really an in-the-wild iphone virus I will update this blog post.