Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by daeken 5924 days ago
That's a very, very silly idea. If the device can be jailbroken by browsing a webpage that exploits a vulnerability in the browser, such a page could also infect your device. The idea that the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are any less vulnerable to viruses than any other networked device out there is just plain wrong. People can and will attack these devices, it's just a matter of how difficult it is; from my experience with auditing Apple's products, the difficulty level is generally somewhere between trivial and damn-near-trivial.
1 comments

The difference is that fixing an iPad won't require a repair shop; it'll require plugging it into your computer, which will go through its normal syncing cycle of backing it up, then upgrading apps—but it'll notice the invalid app checksums on infected apps and overwrite them with App-Store-canonical versions. If kernel-level viruses become prevalent, it'll simply start checksumming that too, and offering to restore from an IPSW with all your data (but nome of your config) intact (but that won't be a problem, since part of Apple's aesthetic is "low configuration.")

Interestingly, it'll mean that only jailbreakers—and those with no access to a computer to sync with—will ever have viruses for more than one sync cycle.