{"id":44701,"date":"2022-08-14T02:18:42","date_gmt":"2022-08-14T02:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/hands-on-with-lockdown-mode-in-ios-16-techcrunch\/"},"modified":"2022-08-14T02:18:42","modified_gmt":"2022-08-14T02:18:42","slug":"hands-on-with-lockdown-mode-in-ios-16-techcrunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/hands-on-with-lockdown-mode-in-ios-16-techcrunch\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands-on with Lockdown Mode in iOS 16 \u2013 TechCrunch"},"content":{"rendered":"
Lockdown Mode is a new<\/span> Apple feature you should hope you’ll never need to use. But for those who do, like journalists, politicians, lawyers and human rights defenders, it’s a last line of defense against nation-state spyware designed to punch through an iPhone’s protections.<\/p>\n The new security feature was announced earlier this year as an \u201cextreme\u201d level of protection against spyware makers that were increasingly finding ways to remotely hack into iPhones without any user interaction. These so-called zero-click attacks are invisible and exploit weaknesses in core iPhone features, like calling, messaging and browsing the web. Apple fixes vulnerabilities as they are discovered, often by security researchers who find evidence of spyware on victims’ phones. But it’s an ongoing chase between Apple and the spyware makers that have targeted thousands of journalists, activists and human rights defenders in recent years.<\/p>\n With Lockdown Mode, Apple is giving users the option to temporarily switch off some of most-abused device features at the push of a button (and a device restart) to make it far more difficult for spyware to break through and siphon off your private phone data. Or, as Apple calls it, \u201csharply reducing the attack surface that potentially could be exploited by highly targeted mercenary spyware.\u201d<\/p>\n TechCrunch tried out Lockdown Mode using an iPhone running Apple’s public beta of iOS 16, which includes the new mode. Lockdown Mode kicks in after some disclaimers and a device restart, and can be switched off again through the Settings menu.<\/p>\n\n Although the mode limits what you can do and who can contact you \u2014 that’s the trade-off for having a far more secure iPhone \u2014 we didn’t find using our iPhone in Lockdown Mode to be overly prohibitive or frustrating as thought when the feature was first announced.<\/p>\n The idea is to shore up as many routes into your iPhone, iPad or Mac from the internet as possible without overly degrading the device’s usability. That means blocking contact from people you don’t know so that only people you know can call or message you. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary, in that your experience may differ based on your needs.<\/p>\n One of the first things you’ll notice is that Lockdown Mode switches off link previews in text messages, which have been shown to unmask a person’s anonymity by obtaining their IP address. The mode doesn’t block the link, just the preview, so you can still copy and paste the web address into your browser. That adds a moment of inconvenience to the user, but it makes it far more difficult for attackers to break in where they once succeeded.<\/p>\nWhat is Lockdown Mode?<\/h2>\n