You know how when you connect to a WiFi network once, you won’t need to keep entering the password again the next time? This is why when you come home from work, you are usually hooked onto your home’s WiFi instead of being on cellular. However according to security researchers Patrick Kelly and Matt Harrigan, this could lead to hackers attacking iPhones and iPads.According to the researchers (via The Next Web), it seems that this has to do with the way iOS devices continually checks Network Time Protocol, which means that this issue seems to only affect iOS devices and not devices of another platform. This means that hackers can take advantage of the flaw and force users to connect to a malicious WiFi network of the same name.
They write, “From an attacker’s perspective, this is a golden opportunity. Why? He only needs to advertise a fake open network called “attwifi” at a spot where large numbers of computer users are known to congregate. Using specialized hardware to amplify his Wi-Fi signal, he can force many users to connect to his (evil) “attwifi” hotspot. From there, he can attempt to inspect, modify or redirect any network traffic for any iPads or other devices that unwittingly connect to his evil network.”
So where does the bricking part come in? Basically with hackers being able to configure the connected devices remotely, they could brick devices using the infamous 1st January, 1970 bug. It’s just one example of what hackers could do and you can avoid it by updating to the latest iOS 9.3.1 update. In any case this is something that Apple definitely needs to look into, so until then maybe you’ll want to be cautious when connecting to public WiFi.