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You Can NOT Just Wipe Your iDevice

I

iBroken

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 17, 2011
27
0
Hi, a while ago my sister's iPhone got stolen at the mall, she freaked out cuz there was some private pics and vids on her iPhone, so i told her that we can wipe all the data using 'Find My iPhone' so we did that after we failed locating her iPhone, wiping her data was such relieve, she got another iPhone and restored all the data from iCloud.

that story was about 3 months ago, today i realized that if the iDevice is jailbroken the wipe operation would never finish, you will get spinning wheel for ever, and when you hold the lock button + the home button for about 3 sec the device will turn off then you can just turn it on normally and you will see that nothing is gone, everything is there.

i googled that issue and found nothing, if someone knows a way behind that or some Cydia tweak to fix that -doubt that- that would be helpful.
 
Auto Location is currently being updated by the developer to be iOS5 compatible. Check it out in cydia. It might be helpful once its updated. It's an awesome tweak.

As far as the phone not fully erasing itself, I can see that. I have read about people pressing the reset all button on a jailbroken device and the device getting stuck in a boot loop. This boot loop can be resolved by performing a hard reset to start up the phone.

You know this is an interesting topic because if the Find My Phone Remote Wipe doesn't work on a jailbroken device, this is valuable information. Interesting nonetheless.
 
The only way I can see that might help is checking the "wipe after 10 wrong guesses" option, as well as using a longer PIN.

If you use only numbers in a 5+ character PIN, you will get the same PINpad as you get with the 4 number one, except it has an OK button. This way, it is almost just as easy as entering the four character codes, and doesn't require the full alphanumeric keyboard.
 
iBroken said:
Hi, a while ago my sister's iPhone got stolen at the mall, she freaked out cuz there was some private pics and vids on her iPhone, so i told her that we can wipe all the data using 'Find My iPhone' so we did that after we failed locating her iPhone, wiping her data was such relieve, she got another iPhone and restored all the data from iCloud.

that story was about 3 months ago, today i realized that if the iDevice is jailbroken the wipe operation would never finish, you will get spinning wheel for ever, and when you hold the lock button + the home button for about 3 sec the device will turn off then you can just turn it on normally and you will see that nothing is gone, everything is there.

i googled that issue and found nothing, if someone knows a way behind that or some Cydia tweak to fix that -doubt that- that would be helpful.
Click to expand...

Yep, your sister's on *******... bummer.
 
Resetting a jailbroken iOS without using iTunes is impossible, even if you used "wipe after 10 wrong guesses", or even if you go to General>>Reset>>Erase All Content and Settings, you will enter the booting loop for ever, the only way to reset it is using iTunes
 
iBroken said:
Resetting a jailbroken iOS without using iTunes is impossible, even if you used "wipe after 10 wrong guesses", or even if you go to General>>Reset>>Erase All Content and Settings, you will enter the booting loop for ever, the only way to reset it is using iTunes
Click to expand...

correct most of us know this but always good for the 3 that don't! because enough make this mistake :rolleyes:
 
Well, if the person who stole your sister's phone now has a spinning wheel, well bully for them.
Hopefully, the thief is too stupid and lazy to figure out how to get out of it.

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Well, if the person who stole your sister's phone has a spinning wheel, well bully for them.
Hopefully, the thief is too stupid and lazy to figure out how to get out of it.
labman said:
correct most of us know this but always good for the 3 that don't! because enough make this mistake :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
+1000 I'm still not sure why anyone would wipe their jb device from their phone. :confused:
 
I will admit that I never even thought of this and assumed I could rely on my information being wiped remotely and by incorrect passwords if it is stolen, even though it is jailbroken.

Because I have the password set, would someone still need to do a restore in order to make the device usable (this erasing my info) and would they be able to backup the device even without the password?
 
Why exactly does wipe not work on Jailbroken devices anyway? Could a tweak be installed to allow it to wipe all data without either removing the jb or completing and keep it bootable?
 
eastercat said:
Well, if the person who stole your sister's phone now has a spinning wheel, well bully for them.
Hopefully, the thief is too stupid and lazy to figure out how to get out of it.

----------

Well, if the person who stole your sister's phone has a spinning wheel, well bully for them.
Hopefully, the thief is too stupid and lazy to figure out how to get out of it.
+1000 I'm still not sure why anyone would wipe their jb device from their phone. :confused:
Click to expand...

her iphone wasn't jailbroken, but a week ago i realized that if it was jailbroken i won't be able to wipe it, so i thought it would be a good idea to discuss this.

gothamguy said:
I will admit that I never even thought of this and assumed I could rely on my information being wiped remotely and by incorrect passwords if it is stolen, even though it is jailbroken.

Because I have the password set, would someone still need to do a restore in order to make the device usable (this erasing my info) and would they be able to backup the device even without the password?
Click to expand...

thats right, as long as your device has password, no one can use it until he erase all of your data, good point
 
iBroken said:
thats right, as long as your device has password, no one can use it until he erase all of your data, good point
Click to expand...
Well, with enough motivation and the right tools, someone can bypass the code. Most thieves, however, are content to steal the hardware and aren't interested in the data.
It's why I'm leery of keeping financial info on my phone. If a thief gets access to it, that's a bigger hit than losing the phone.
 
eastercat said:
It's why I'm leery of keeping financial info on my phone. If a thief gets access to it, that's a bigger hit than losing the phone.
Click to expand...
That's why most sensitive apps have a password built-in and data encrypted so unless they were trying to ***** you up, they wouldn't care to try and crack it.
That is of course, expecting the developers uses a good encrypting algorithm and so on.

But this topic is cool, opened my eyes on something I had no idea:
1. You cannot wipe a jailbroken device.
2. You cannot update OTA on a jailbroken device.

The second one I can live without. The first one tho'... a bit scary.
Sometimes I feel like making a tweak that will wipe the phone if I don't do something every day or two, but then I dunno, guess the app would have to kill -9 all apps and then delete the "Documents" folder of each app.
But then we don't even have cron on iOS.

But it's a good developing challenge, hopefully once I get my lazy ass on some Xcode, I will figure something out.
 
You can wipe a jb phone, but you have to do it from itunes. If you do it from the phone, you have to dfu it out of the spinning wheel. If you jb, that's not a big deal.
The 2nd point is moot, because you can't update a jb device without using custom firmware or wiping it in itunes.
ipsychedelic said:
But this topic is cool, opened my eyes on something I had no idea:
1. You cannot wipe a jailbroken device.
2. You cannot update OTA on a jailbroken device.

The second one I can live without. The first one tho'... a bit scary.
Click to expand...
 
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