The Sky is Falling!

Did you turn off your iPhone? If you didn’t, is it dead yet? I didn’t think so.

There is a lot of buzz on the Internet about the demonstration by Charlie Miller and Collin Mulliner of the iPhone virus at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. First, they didn’t report that the virus is out there in the wild. They demonstrated it at the conference. OK, I’m sure those two guys are much smarter than me. I’m not a hacker. I don’t create viruses. I’m not even a programmer. I’m just a guy who loves working on his computer, and now on the iPhone too.

Your iPhone, Palm, Blackberry, etc… they are computers. Just as that machine sitting on your desk is a computer. Since the late 1960s or early 1970s, there have been computer viruses. You know what? As long as there are computers, there will be computer viruses. It doesn’t matter. The really smart people who make the computer systems will do their best to make their systems virus proof, and there will always be other really smart people who do their best to find vulnerabilities. It is a cycle that will keep going, and going, and going.

Now, there is even a report about how an attacker can conduct a “Man-in-the-Middle” attack against Web sites with Extended Validation (EV) Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

And, yet another about a vulnerability in Mac OS X.

The only computer that is truly safe from a virus is off, and unplugged. That computer doesn’t do you much good. So for now, I’m not shutting down my iPhone. I’m not shutting down my computer. If I get virus, then so be it.