If someone with a jailbroken iPhone send me a photo on iMessages (or snapchat) and I save it to my camera roll, can that photo give me a virus?
My iPhone is not jailbroken.
No, your phone cannot become infected if it is not jailbroken.
Photos cannot infect each other. However, if there is a “buffer overflow” bug in a photo management software app that could allow the app to infect other photos. But that would be very unlikely on an iOS device. Possible but still unlikely on a Mac, much more likely in Windows, which does not have memory isolation between data and code.
Unfortunately this can get very complicated to explain without a fairly deep understanding of computer operating system memory management.
No form of malware that can damage your phone or threaten your data. If you visit sketchy websites you can get some annoying content that you will want to remove.
There is no antivirus software for iOS devices, partly because they don’t need it, but also because the security model of iOS doesn’t give antivirus software sufficient privilege to inspect files in other apps. This doesn’t prevent worthless antivirus software from being sold for iPhones, however.
Well, it’s “practically perfect”. But cybersecurity is not like a wall that you build once and it keeps everyone out; you have to be ever alert for potential breaches. Apple pays substantial rewards for verifiable reports of issues (they recently paid $100,000 to someone who found a vulnerability) and they release updates to fix them quickly.
Correct. That’s also true for most other computers, certainly Macs, and even PCs most of the time. Where you can get into trouble with Windows is if you embed a compromised photo in another document such as a Word file. But Windows antiviruses, even Windows Defender, will catch this.
Just one more question. Is each photo in its own “box”, so if one photo contains a virus it won’t be able to affect the other photos. Or is it the photo app itself that is “boxed” in so it may be a virus in the app?
sorry if it’s a stupid question.
Thank you very much for taking your time and answer my question in such detail as you just did, it really means a lot to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about viruses and malware and such. And after reading through all kinds of different forums I got pretty unsure about everything. Big relief to know for sure I have nothing unwanted on my device.
No, that wouldn’t be necessary. Just tap on the 3 dots in the lower right corner of the Chrome screen, choose History and tap Clear Browsing Data. Then check all of the options and Clear Browsing Data.
Hi! Last time you answered my questions, you seemed to know a lot about software and such. I was wondering if you could answer my question from my most recent “post” about my apple MacBook charger. I would really appreciate it if you took the time to do that.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find your other post if it isn’t in this thread. Can you provide a link to it? I’ll see if I can find it from your history, but the forum gets thousands of posts a day, so finding a specific one is a needle in a haystack problem.
Ok, but can you explain why? I thought photo files could include viruses.
aa I see. So on iPhone the photo can only be a photo and is “boxed” in it’s own area so it can’t affect anything else?
Ok, thank you very much for your replies. Have been thinking a lot about it lately.
Ok, thank you very much for telling me that!
Can you get malware or a virus from saving a photo that someone sent to you when you have an iPhone?
