iPhone app tells users if phones have been hacked into or secretly jailbroken

There’s no easy way of telling if a phone has been broken into – but if it has, all of your personal data could be at risk

A man tries out the iPhone SE in Tokyo (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

A new iPhone app could tell people when they’ve been secretly hacked into, potentially protecting the entirety of their digital lives.

The new tool allows people to see if their phone has been jailbroken without their knowledge, a process that could completely expose the phone if it were to happen.

Until now, it has been difficult to find out whether that process has happened to any particular device. Jailbroken phones – which run extra software that hasn’t been approved by Apple – can look entirely like normal ones, apart from the fact that they can be easily used to spy on their owners.

If a phone is secretly jailbroken, malicious people can use that fact to steal information from the phone including photos, messages and everything that the phone sees or hears.

So the new app – called System and Security Information, and available through the App Store – checks the phone to see whether it might have been interfered with by such malicious people. It gives a quick way of telling whether there is a jailbreak or any other anomalies found on the phone – allowing people to feel safer if there isn’t, or take action if there is.

Jailbreaking tools are sold by shady firms to government agencies in some controversial countries, as well as to parents who want to watch the activities of their children. They can be used to break into any phone.

They tend to be the only way of doing so, because of the tight security that Apple installs onto phones. Jailbreaking modifies the operating software of the phone to break some of Apple’s safeguards and allows other software to be installed – some people do it to get more access to the phone, but it also comes with big security drawbacks.

All that needs to be done to hide the fact that a phone has been secretly jailbroken is to delete one file.

Spying an Android phones is a lot easier – but the security of iPhones can lead some people into believing they are safe.

Jailbreaking isn’t thought to be the only way of spying on phones, and there are plenty of reasons to jailbreak a phone that aren’t related to government spying. But the app hopes to show people whether or not their phone has been compromised to stop the kinds of tools that are made by firms like HackingTeam, which is thought to sell iPhone exploits on to governments and other agencies.