Does your cell phone battery spy on you how to#
Does your cell phone battery spy on you install#

'It doesn't know how to turn on the lights or the sound, it only knows how to turn on the USB port.'īut McDonald cautions that unless you go into DFU mode, the phone partially reboots before turning off, as shown by the Apple logo appearing before the screen goes dark. 'It's like an innocent little kid in kindergarten,' says McDonald.

Does your cell phone battery spy on you install#

In DFU mode, says McDonald, all elements of the phone are entirely shut down except its USB port, which is designed to wait for a signal from iTunes to install new firmware. Instead, McDonald suggests users turn off their iPhones by putting them into device firmware upgrade (DFU) mode, a kind of 'panic' state designed to let the phone reinstall its firmware or recover from repeated operating system crashes. 'With physical access, they could change the chips, the memory, the ROMs, the power system, anything they want,' Graham says.īut paranoid users seeking temporary privacy from NSA uber-hackers needn't resort to Snowden's famous precaution of putting phones in the fridge. That latter possibility might have sounded apocryphal until journalist Glenn Greenwald published photos last month showing the NSA opening boxes of Cisco routers to insert backdoors into the gear. Its methods could range from a web exploit, like the 2011 Jailbreakme hack that disassembled the iPhone's security restrictions when users visited a carefully crafted webpage, to actually intercepting shipped phones before they reach users. He soon amended the post to concede the NSA could, in fact, alter a phone ahead of time to enable that ultra-sneaky bugging. >'If you're going to be paranoid, you might as well be super-paranoid.'Īfter Snowden told Williams his powered-down phone could be used as an eavesdropping tool, security consultant Robert David Graham immediately responded with a blog post arguing the trick is impossible. And it would be very difficult to know whether the phone has been compromised.' 'But it’s conceivable that the baseband is still on, or turns on periodically. If the NSA used an exploit like those McDonald's worked on to infect phone with malware that fakes a shutdown, 'the screen would look black and nothing would happen if you pressed buttons,' he says. McDonald is also a member of the Evad3rs, a team of iPhone hackers who created jailbreaks for the two previous iPhone operating systems. This “playing dead” state would allow the phone to receive commands, including one to activate its microphone, says Eric McDonald, a hardware engineer in Los Angeles.