If you are an iPhone owner and have been holding off on updating your phone for whatever reason, now is the time to update it. A new exploit called “Broadpwn” has been discovered leaving iPhones, iPads, and the iPod touch vulnerable to this new exploit.
A hacker may easily compromise a local router or an IoT device to launch the exploit and without any interaction on your phone you can quickly become a victim of whatever code the hacker would like to execute. So before reading on, go ahead and update to the latest version of iOS (currently 10.3.3 as of this writing)
The good news is this attack must be executed within the wifi range of you device and is referred to as a proximity attack. The hacker would be unable to launch the exploit unless he is close to your devices. Essentially public places with large amounts of people or from a car driving around a neighborhood would be two easy examples of ideal places to launch this exploit.
The exploit was recently discovered by Nitay Artenstein during the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas. Artenstein has a scheduled talk about how he and his team found the exploits. The talk also goes into details about other remote exploits for android and ios devices.
Security threats are constantly evolving and it is a good practice to keep your connected devices up to date with the latest security patches.