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About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

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Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#31

Post by kemayo »

dhdhdudhsg wrote: post #23

I’ll be using this but what a stupid exception imo. I work in a big building where anyone could walk in without id and simply defeat the protection. Hell, a disgruntled coworker contractor or customer could be in on it. > When your iPhone is in a familiar location, these additional steps are not required, and you can use your device passcode like usual. Familiar locations typically include your home, work, and certai…

This is a pretty direct response to the WSJ's iPhone theft story from last year[1], which was focused on people managing to shoulder-surf your passcode while you're in a public place, steal your phone, then use your passcode to reset your Apple ID password (thus locking you out of being able to report the phone as stolen). It apparently relied on multiple people and a certain amount of social engineering -- one party managing to get the phone into a passcode-required state, another to see it entered, and a third to actually lift the phone.

The hope would thus be that although someone could walk into your workplace and steal your phone off your desk, they would be much less likely to have been able to watch you enter your passcode first.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-iphone-security-theft-pas...

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#32

Post by dylan604 »

ghostpepper wrote: post #7
dylan604 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it prevents reselling the phone, it doesn't prevent the phone from being stolen. It would be a dumb criminal to leave you your phone to allow you to immediately call the police if you've been mugged. Just take the phone, trash it literally placing it in a bin or destroying it or both. At the end of the day, you still don't have the phone whether the thief profits from it or not. All this will do is prevent cr…

Why would a criminal steal your phone if they knew they couldn't sell it?

you mean beside the specific examples of why i provided in the comment you replied to?

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#33

Post by nereye »

hbn wrote: post #13
bgentry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature is not really about protecting your device from being stolen. It's about protecting your iCloud account and everything on your device from being compromised when somebody has stolen your device and also has your phone's passcode. It's an attempt to resolve the fairly widespread iPhone / iCloud social engineering takeover attacks that were documented in great detail by Joanna Stern last year: https://www.…

> This feature is not really about protecting your device from being stolen. Once a thief has stolen his 10th iPhone that he can't do anything with, he'll probably be less likely to bother stealing iPhones. If anything it's a liability since it can be tracked as long as it still has some battery.

This is assuming that the thief can tell which phone brand/model it is at the time of theft.

For phones which are in a case/cover, inside bags etc., it seems almost impossible so am unsure that this is an effective deterrent.

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#35

Post by artdigital »

Way overdue feature IMHO. A reason why I didn’t want to use passcodes or keychain for passwords was that once someone knew my passcode to unlock my phone, they could access all my accounts

1Password at least uses a different password and isn’t unlockable with passcode alone

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#36

Post by dhdhdudhsg »

shuckles wrote: post #28
dhdhdudhsg wrote: post #23

I’ll be using this but what a stupid exception imo. I work in a big building where anyone could walk in without id and simply defeat the protection. Hell, a disgruntled coworker contractor or customer could be in on it. > When your iPhone is in a familiar location, these additional steps are not required, and you can use your device passcode like usual. Familiar locations typically include your home, work, and certai…

I don’t think iPhone thieves are smart enough to connect a snatched phone’s owner’s identity to a location nor are they stupid enough to regularly go to a frequent location to unlock a stolen device. In practice, a change like this will help a lot. Most stolen phones get put into the Shenzhen parts supply chain, and it’s probably not economical for the middlemen to do bespoke work to unlock the device.

Oh how very wrong you are. This feature came in response to WSJ reporting about iPhone thieves, targeting affluent iPhone users so they could steal their iPhones and rapidly lock the owner out. All while accessing their bank accounts, credit cards etc.

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#37

Post by landr0id »

natch wrote: post #24

So the next step for the criminals (the ones who steal both the passcode and phone) is to find your address (often stored in Contacts, or available in your Amazon account) then physically go there and lurk nearby while finishing their pwning steps. I may be missing something. But if not it seems like Apple is now incentivizing a scenario where thieves will physically go to the location of their victims homes in order…

I know somebody who was recently drugged and had their iPhone stolen (amongst other things) while on a trip in New Orleans. While he has no recollection of the night, this may have mitigated the damage they were able to cause and the trouble he had to go through to recover his Apple ID.

I doubt the thieves would physically travel to his home for the phone, but I suspect that this will lead to blackmailing scenarios where the thieves exfil risqué or compromising content and threaten to send it to sensitive contacts if you don't unlock the phone the next day.

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#38

Post by kemayo »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #27
pc86 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She offered to leave the phone in a pharmacy across town! I don't know how that would've helped. Well for one, the pharmacy isn't moving.

I would say that moving the phone from the place I left it would promote it from "lost" to "stolen". Can you now envision a conversation between this passenger and the pharmacy clerk: "I found this phone in some car" "What do you want me to do about it?" "Hold on to it until some guy I don't know comes to claim it?" "We don't want this personal property! Go away!" [Waymo car is gone now] [Passenger absconds with phon…

You're overthinking it; it'd just be "I found this phone". They don't need to give the backstory. Most businesses will hold onto valuable lost property for a while, on the assumption that a customer dropped something.

> I would say that moving the phone from the place I left it would promote it from "lost" to "stolen".

A really key element here is that they offered to help you out by leaving it there for you, so I don't see how "stolen" would come in to it...

Re: About Stolen Device Protection for iPhone

#40

Post by [deleted] »

shuckles wrote: post #28
dhdhdudhsg wrote: post #23

I’ll be using this but what a stupid exception imo. I work in a big building where anyone could walk in without id and simply defeat the protection. Hell, a disgruntled coworker contractor or customer could be in on it. > When your iPhone is in a familiar location, these additional steps are not required, and you can use your device passcode like usual. Familiar locations typically include your home, work, and certai…

I don’t think iPhone thieves are smart enough to connect a snatched phone’s owner’s identity to a location nor are they stupid enough to regularly go to a frequent location to unlock a stolen device. In practice, a change like this will help a lot. Most stolen phones get put into the Shenzhen parts supply chain, and it’s probably not economical for the middlemen to do bespoke work to unlock the device.

[deleted]
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