This has never happened before: A pre-release version of iOS 14 appeared in the hacking and lugging scene months ago. Since then, there have been fresh details from the code of the new mobile operating system for the iPhone, which was only officially planned for autumn.
Exactly how exactly the developer variant was able to escape from the Internet was not known. The IT blog Motherboard citing sources familiar with the situation, reports that it is came to the leak in December 2019 could be; at least the operating system dates to this period. The software spread online in February at the latest.
An iPhone 11 from China for thousands of dollars
Apparently, sources from the jailbreaking community managed to get an iPhone 11 on which iOS 14 was already running at the time. It was actually intended for Apple developers. China originated where sellers offered it for “thousands of dollars”. The internal build of iOS 14 was then extracted from the iPhone 11 and distributed among jailbreaking experts and security researchers.
The iPhone 11, on which iOS 14 was installed, is believed to have been rooted, according to a hacker Motherboard. This made it easy to extract the operating system. “That makes it easy to make a literal copy.” It was “the very first time” that an iOS version was leaked so many months in advance.
Memories of 2017 – but this time it’s worse
Apple’s current schedule is to present iOS 14 on June 22nd at the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), which is held virtually this time. Then a developer beta and later a public beta would have been published. Both have been adjusted for details of new products, which of course was not the case with the internal version, which was released six months early.
All of this is reminiscent of leaks from 2017, when details of the iPhone X and 8 were leaked in advance, which Apple accidentally released via the iOS 11 GM version itself. But back then, an internal build hadn’t escaped half a year in advance, which makes the current affair significantly worse.
Discover security gaps in advance
Loud Motherboard the leaked iOS 14 code could also result in Apple being faced with new security problems. Security experts from all over the world – including those who do not report gaps to the company and sell them to governments, for example – are in the process of analyzing the code and checking for bugs.
“The shit is wild,” commented the well-known iOS security expert Will Strafach. Another observer of the scene, Ryan Duff from SIXGEN, said that you get “significantly more information about an upcoming iOS than we usually have”.
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