Another iOS 7 Bug Lets Anyone Make Calls From Locked iPhones—And This One Has No Quick Fix
And This One Has No Quick Fix — Apple has yet to fix one nasty bug in the lockscreen of iOS 7, and the next one has already appeared. — On Friday, Karam Daoud, a 27-year old Palestinian living in the West Bank city of Ramallah …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple shipped iOS 7 to the public this week alongside the iPhone 5s and 5c launch, with demand it calls 'incredible' and heavy promotion of Touch ID as a security feature. The lockscreen — the single barrier standing between a stranger and a phone — has already failed twice: Karam Daoud, a 27-year-old researcher in Ramallah, disclosed this call-making bypass just as coverage of the first iOS 7 lockscreen bug was still circulating.
The pattern predates iOS 7: a separate iPhone passcode bypass surfaced in February 2013, so this is at least the third lockscreen failure in under a year to get wide disclosure. The pickup across Business Insider, Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable and five other outlets within a day shows how much attention launch-week security flaws now command.
First-order effects
- Anyone with physical access to a locked, unpatched iOS 7 device can place calls from it — a direct cost and privacy exposure for owners, since outgoing calls bill to the victim's account.
- Apple enters its highest-profile launch week of the year with two unfixed lockscreen bugs, undercutting the secure-device messaging it is using to sell Touch ID on the iPhone 5s.
Second-order effects
- Daoud's disclosure sets the tempo for other researchers: with one bypass already public and no patch available, expect further lockscreen variants to surface quickly, each forcing Apple to triage mid-launch rather than on its own schedule.
- Carrier partners absorb part of the fallout, since fraudulent calls placed from bypassed handsets land on their networks and their customers' bills before any Apple fix ships.
Third-order effects
- If every major iOS release keeps drawing independent lockscreen bypasses within days, researchers are functioning as an unofficial QA layer for Apple's annual OS cycle — a structural gap between the pace of full UI rewrites like iOS 7's and regression testing of the lock path.
- Sustained recurrence of these bugs strengthens the case for treating lockscreen integrity as a regulatory-grade expectation for consumer devices rather than a vendor-managed quality issue.
The trend: Each major iOS release is now stress-tested by independent researchers within its first days, making lockscreen bypasses a predictable fixture of Apple's launch cycle rather than an anomaly.