Hacker claims to have jailbroken iPhone 7 in just 24 hours, but don’t expect it to be released

Chance Miller | Sep 22 2016 - 2:58 pm PT

The iPhone 7 hit the market just a week ago, but hackers have already started work on attempting to jailbreak the device. As noted by Motherboard, one teenage hacker has already had success in jailbreaking the iPhone 7 running iOS 10. In fact, the 19-year-old developer, Luca Todesco, claims to have successfully done so in just 24 hours…

Speaking to Motherboard, Todesco explained that Apple definitely made the process harder with the iPhone 7, but noted that it’s not 100 percent secure yet. Todesco announced the jailbreak on his Twitter, simply saying “this is a jailbroken iPhone 7” and including a screenshot of terminal where he has root access. He also shared the below video to further prove the legitimacy of his claim, as well as a shot of the jailbreak app store Cydia running.

“Kudos for the iPhone 7. They have again changed the rules of the game,” he told me. “I don’t think it will ever be enough. They can raise the effort required, but there will always be someone willing to invest enough time to do it.”

Todesco doesn’t plan to release his jailbreak to the public until Apple patches it, though. He says that in the meantime, he will work to make the process simpler and cleaner.

Todesco said that, at least for now, he’s keeping the details of how he jailbroke the phone to himself—at least until Apple releases a patch. That’s the only choice he has, he added, given that Apple won’t give bug hunters special devices that allow them to load custom firmware.

“Being able to have access to the hardest target among mobile targets is very useful,” he said, explaining that having a jailbroken phone is useful to do live debugging and find even more bugs.

The concept of jailbreaking has somewhat waned in popularity over recent years, but it’s still a thriving community of developers. Earlier this year, developers successfully jailbroke iOS 9.3.3, but the vulnerability was patched relatively quickly by Apple and the company subsequently stopped signing that version of iOS.

With Apple already beta testing iOS 10.1, it’s likely that the update will path the vulnerability used by Todesco, though Todesco hasn’t decided if he will submit the vulnerability to Apple’s bounty program.

View the video of Todesco’s jailbroken iPhone 7 below.