For those who do not password protect their phones, perhaps you might want to reconsider that course because thanks to a recently discovered iOS 7 bug, it basically allows someone who has access to your phone to not only delete your iCloud account, but also disable Find My iPhone which will essentially render Activation Lock moot.
Now Apple has thought about security before and has made it pretty complicated in order to delete or to disable certain features. However what this bug does is that it allows users to bypass certain password requirements in order to delete either the iCloud account or to disable the Find My iPhone feature.
The video above basically demonstrates how this is done and while it does appear to be somewhat trick, it is relatively straightforward and should not prove to be too difficult. The main “trick” here is to power down the phone when prompted for your iTunes password and when the phone is restarted, you will be able to access the iCloud settings panel and remove the account without being prompted for a password.
Like we said this effectively renders Activation Lock moot and that feature is one of the features meant to deter smartphone theft, so if a thief were to be made aware of this issue, safe to say that your stolen iPhone can be easily resold. As we mentioned earlier, one of the ways to prevent this is to password protect your iPhone to begin with, or use the iPhone 5s’ biometric security feature.
In the meantime we hope Apple has taken note of this bug and are working to fix it ASAP.
Filed in . Read more about iOS 7.