Turn off your iPhones!!! Well, for today, at least. I wasn’t going to post this since it had just been a rumor.. Now it’s been posted on major news sites such as The Feed and Engadget.

So, here’s the situation. Appearantly, some hackers have been able to create a malicious SMS (AKA text message) that can tell your iPhone what to do without you controlling it. It’s sent ‘invisibly’ so you don’t even know your infected. From there, the hackers have access to everything- They can turn on your mic and camera and snap some shots, steal passwords from Safari, completely lock down and brick your phone, steal phone numbers and pictures, or anything else they can think of. The SMS would work like this: They send the message, you recieve it, the iphone goes to preview the message and reads a snippit of code, the code tells the iPhone not to preview the SMS but instead follow other snippits of code. Those snippits can be anything the hackers want them to be.

So why is this the end of the world? Well, the SMS’s are set to be released today. No real word on who’s behind it but appearantly Apple’s known for a while about the exploit and has yet to patch it because they can’t find the loophole that the hackers are talking about. These hackers got me thinking… How would they send out the SMS’s? One would assume that a bulk spam message would be sent out over the entire AT&T network or something but then everyone would receive the message and people without the iPhone would be like, “What’s this garbage? Another spam message… DELETE!” That would take a lot of computer power that most hackers don’t have access to. There is another way.. AT&T has the ability to see which phone you’re using on their network and they file it. (Don’t believe me? Check your phone bill and see if it says ‘iPhone’ at the top.) Hackers may have come across this list and would be able to send out the messages to only iPhone holders. The less messages they send, the faster and more attacks the can deal.

P.S. If you think this is an April Fool’s joke, take a look at your calender.