How to Make Your iPhone Secure After the Jailbreak

Let me start this article by telling you about a person who was successful in attacking the vulnerabilities of phones on T-mobile Netherlands last year. There was not really a grave malicious intent on the side of the hacker except that he just wanted the people–whose iPhones were hacked–to know how vulnerable their gadgets were and he wanted them to pay 5 Euros to gain security for their iPhones. The hacker took advantage of the known root password (i.e. alpine) to get into jailbroken iPhones.

There are so many advantages which come when you jailbreak your iPhone. Some of them include the use of Twidget which enables you to view your tweets on lock screen and the use of Winterboard to let you manage the themes in your iPhone. Additionally, jailbreaking your iPhone will give you total control over your iPhone file system. However, once your iPhone is jailbroken, it will become vulnerable and less secure; you will need to take extra measure to retain its security.

One reason why the hacker was able to get into the iPhones of the victims is because they haven’t changed the default password after they had them jailbroken. Considering the fact that “alpine” is the default password of the root directory, and that the whole world knows about this, you should take some time to change it into your own password which no one knows about–except you.

Perhaps, the reason why people leave their password unchanged after jailbreaking their iPhone is because they do not know how. If you are one of them, then this would be the guide you are looking for…

Change the Root Password of your iPhone

Before anything else, I assume you had your iPhone jailbroken…

1. Open Cydia and install MobileTerminal app; you will need this to launch the Terminal app.

2. Launch the Terminal app. Key in this command:

su

Now, key in the default password:

alpine

By doing this, you will be able to log in as the “root” user. It means that you will be able to access everything inside your iPhone while using this user. Also, always remember that the passwords will not be shown/echoed on screen.

3. Once you have done all of the above, you are ready to proceed to this next step.

Key in this command:

passwd

This command will let you change the password for the “root” user.  After you key it in, you will then be prompted to type and confirm your new password.

And that’s it! I am sure you will find this tutorial easy enough to follow. But anyway, let me remind you that you also need to have a strong password; what’s the use of having a password if anyone can easily crack it, right?

Choose a Strong Password

This one may not be new to you. However, there are still people who do not know how to create a password which is harder to crack. The fact is, majority of the people use their birthdays, surnames or a combination of their first and last names plus their birthdays. Believe me, those passwords can be easily cracked even by a grade-schooler. Here is a quick guide for you to come up with a really good password;

1. Always use a combination of Numbers, Letters and Characters.
2. Capitalize some of the Letters randomly.
3. Have as many characters as possible in your password. A minimum of six characters would be good enough.
4. Never ever use your First Name, Last Name, Birthday or the names of your family and friends. More often, people know more about you than you think they do.
5. If possible, use a string of characters which you can easily type without even looking at the keyboard.
6. Do not use any actual word because crackers have dictionaries which contain millions of possible passwords that they can easily run to crack your password. Never ever use the word “password.”
7. Always find an easy way to remember your passwords. Writing them down is always the worst option you can have.
8. Above all, never ever give your password to anyone.

More often, we treat our iPhones as diaries which hold some of our personal information which we do not want to be exposed to anyone we don’t know. Therefore, making them more secure is the best thing we can do to protect our privacy. I hope this article is helpful enough. If you think I lack some important things in here, please feel free to leave comments or suggestions below. Or, if you want to get updates from this site, enter your email below.

Harold

Harold is a techno geek who writes Technology News. While technology is his passion, he also writes about travel tips, iPhone how-to's and other fresh news on the web. He is even very active in a News Community which seeks to bring the latest news for online readers around the world.