Once again Apple iPhone has been unlocked by a determined youngster, the same who was amongst the first to unlock it last year winning himself a rather nice car and a few 8gb iPhones.

It just shows nothing is infallible, all he needed to find was a writable memory address and he was pretty much done (he used a much higher range of registers than previously).

A teen hacker known for his deftness with iPhones has figured out how to unlock models running the latest firmware versions by cracking a protection that has frustrated hackers for weeks.

The breakthrough by George Hotz, aka Geohot, means people who have bought a recent iPhone will once again be able to use it on the phone network of their choice. Apple makes as much as $400 for every handset that’s activated on an approved network, so its developers have worked hard to prevent the so-called unlocking of iPhones.

A very smart young man indeed, just showing 1 person can indeed defeat the security of a huge multi-national billion dollar company.

And he’s done it twice.

The latest salvo was fired late last week, following a 24-hour hacking spree by Geohot that was broken up by only three hours of sleep. It turns out the latest firmware contained modifications to the device’s memory registers to prevent unlocking. Geohot worked around those changes by finding another, much higher register that was vulnerable.

“I guess Apple thought big numbers were harder to guess,” he wrote.

He then found a way to install his custom-built code by exploiting a flaw that allowed him to erase a range of memory addresses where security software is stored.

An amazing 27% of iPhones are running on unauthorized networks which means they are cracked. Of course Apple will soon come out with a new firmware update that negates this problem….but then the game will just start all over again.

And no one doubt Geohot or someone like him will break it again.

If you want to know how to do it check out step-by-step instructions here from iClarified here.

Source: The Register