All that you hold dear is usually transferred immediately to the closest mobile device, so it only makes sense that you’d want to password protect it, right? Well, the iPad 2 password can be bypassed in about 5 seconds:
Yeah, it’s pretty easy. Just press and hold the power/lock button to shut down. You will be presented with the slide to power off screen. Close the magnetic lid, which acts similar to the lock button, but (obviously) doesn’t affect the shut down sequence. Open the lid to activate the screen and hit ‘Cancel’ on the shut down screen. BLAMMO! You’re in. Ray and Michael put it best:
It’s kind of a big screw-up, but no one knew until it came to light. Hopefully Apple patches this quickly. According to Reddit user Ninjapants:
This is real and a very huge deal. I work with iPads and did some testing and here is what I’ve found:
- This works on iOS5 but not iOS4 (at least not on the 4.3.3 device I tested)
- You can only have access to whatever app they left open although for the email application and other sensitive applications, this is a very big deal
- I have not found a way to access any other app–even from the home screen which can only be viewed if that what was on the screen last before it was locked.
- Even though my iPad is set to view 50 messages at a time, only 15 or so which readable via this exploit–the rest were ghost emails lacking all detail
- It can disabled by going into settings and disabling the smart cover feature.
This needs to be fixed immediately and is extremely embarrassing for Apple.
Michael offered up this explanation as to how this may have slipped by the testers:
The thing about the stuff that seems obvious to a user can often get past a tester simply because of the myriad things that they have to test. You get a list of requirements, from that you write procedures, and after a while you start to get tunnel vision of a sort where you just test what’s on the paper and you forget that the user doesn’t have that paper. They are going to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
Basically, testers can’t account for a lot of the dumb crap that end users will do. At this point in technology, no one reads the manual, and no one follows procedures step-for-step, especially when it’s something as simple as hitting a cancel switch on the power-of.
It’s also noted that the 5 finger swipe will open the taskbar, but you cannot switch to other apps. I recommend not locking your iPad on anything vital, and don’t just leave it laying around either.
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