Developers fall victim to an iMessage DoS attack
In recent days, numerous developers and self-proclaimed “hackers” have been victimized by a DoS attack via Apple’s in-house news service iMessage.
What is a Dos Attack?
A DoS attack is meaningless spamming with meaningless messages. As a rule, this is hundreds to thousands of these pointless messages. The messages sent in this case sent via a Mac OS X messaging app use a simple Apple script.
The insidious thing about this script is that it sends a lot of messages to the respective addressees at minimal intervals, forcing the latter to clean its mailbox and message center immediately. As is the case with a classic DoS attack, the numerous messages sent here are sometimes of such size and enormous length that they crash Apple’s in-house app designed for iMessage.
For what reason did this attack occur?
Currently affected and neutral observers go from an annoying joke, which has no further meaning. Those affected by this DoS attack on iMessage can not yet be pinpointed. However, according to the news portal “TheNextWeb”, at least half a dozen Apple developers and a few members of the hacker community are affected by this annoying attack.
The developer Grant Paul reports that this attack allows conclusions to be drawn that Apple does not limit the number of messages that can be sent via iMessage. This means, in plain language, that there is no limit to how many messages can be sent in a given period of time. According to Grant Paul, this is so far a simple “flood of news”.
Is there a solution to the problem?
The only option currently available to those affected is to disable iMessage to avoid the barrage of messages. Since it is not yet known who started this attack. Another solution would be that Apple will limit the number of messages that can be sent in iMessage with a quick update
