Apple iPhone 7 Succumbs To Jailbreak Wizardry Of Teen Hacker

It didn't take long for someone to figure out how to jailbreak Apple's newfangled iPhone 7 handset. A 19-year-old hacker known online as "qwertyoruiop" and offline as Luca Todesco needed just 24 hours to thwart the security measures in place of Apple's "best, most advanced iPhone ever" and iOS 10, the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system.

By jailbreaking the iPhone 7, Todesco put himself in full control of the device. The biggest benefit to jailbreaking is being able to install apps outside of the App Store that haven't been approved by Apple. There's a world of functionality and features out there that Apple hasn't authorized, and if you want to install them, jailbreaking your handset is the only way to go.


Though it didn't take Todesco a long time to discover and exploit a series of bugs and vulnerabilities on the iPhone 7, he says it wasn't exactly easy, especially compared to previous generation iPhone models.

"They definitely made my life harder," Todesco told Motherboard. "The iPhone 7 is a step in the right direction. Obviously it's not 100 percent secure, like nothing else is."

This is the first known jailbreak of the iPhone 7, and it happened a mere five days after Apple released the handset to retail. For the time being, Todesco plans to keep mum on the details, a choice he made because Apple doesn't give bug hunters special handsets to load custom firmware. The reason he'd want one is because a jailbroken iPhone makes live debugging easier.