A little over a week ago we discussed how the latest IOS update; IOS 17.5, was somehow resurfacing old media. Like very very old media, some going as far back as 2010.
Now at the time, there were a number of puzzles concerning this bug such as; what was the exploit that resulted in the resurfacing of such old media? Why were devices formatted per Apple’s standards and guidelines not exempt from this? Was this a hardware-related issue or was it tied uniquely to your Apple ID? These and many other questions crossed the minds of several parties as we awaited further investigation and of course a response from Apple.
Well, we have an official response from Apple and to be honest, it is quite, interesting. Apple in its communications with 9to5Mac said the bug was caused by a corrupt database entry on the device’s file system, impacting files on the devices themselves and not those that had been synced to iCloud. Those files may have been carried over from older devices when restored from a backup or during device-to-device transfer.
What does this mean you might ask? Well to make it very simple Apple is saying that the bug was able to access deleted files from your file system similarly to a data recovery software. This does resurrect the fear of the public in how data is never truly deleted but on the bright side, Apple claims that this bug has nothing to do with users’ iCloud so any assertions related to that are false.
Security researchers at Synactiv also added that based upon their reverse engineering of IOS 17.5, the update had a migration routine that found files still on the file system of the device and just reimported it. As to how these files are still on the device they have no way of speaking on that.
So in conclusion Apple say’s there was a problem and media on their hardware was resurfaced because of a bug in their update. They haven’t really spoken on how this happened BUT, they have released a patch to fix the problem; IOS 17.5.1. Get that as soon as possible.
