Apple has recently decided that it has had enough of iPhone users jailbreaking the device. It has gone to the US Copyright Office (DMCA) to make this practice illegal.
According to Engadget, Apple feels that jailbreaking is not only a copyright violation but has the potential to become a significant security threat. Jailbroken phones could offer hackers the possibility of remotely crashing cell towers, commencing a denial of service (DOS) attack and moreover “render the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data.”
Besides these, Apple also believes that jailbreaking poses other problems such as making the phone unstable, possibility of a privacy breach, susceptibility to malware, inability to update software and deterioration in the quality of the cellular network.
Furthermore, according to Apple these issues could lead to “discouragement of innovation, and damage to Apple’s brand and to its relationship with developers.”
Although jailbroken iPhones have not caused such serious problems as declared by Apple yet, there was a case where network issues were caused by a jailbroken application called ‘Pushfix.’ It recently sent AIM messages to multiple numbers due to a code which possessed bugs.