Just last week I binge-watched the first two seasons of The Boys. As a techie, a particular scene stood out to me—the one where Hughie hacked Starlight’s phone without even touching it. This is actually possible in real life.
Here’s the scene in the superhero series:
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And here are real-life demos of Ian Beer, a Google Project Zero researcher, remotely rebooting and taking control of iPhones:
Curious on how Beer’s hack works? He thoroughly explains it on his blog.
The exploit takes advantage of vulnerabilities found in the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol in iOS for device-to-device communications. Example services that use AWDL include AirDrop and AirPlay.
Fortunately for iPhone users, there are no known instances of the exploit being used in the wild. Apple has also released a patch back in May to address this exploit, so users only need to download the latest updates from the app store.