Well, the old times “dialers” from the dial-up Internet days are apparently back, this time on your iPhone.
A bunch of French iPhone users have analyzed that some AdMob in-app ad banners, when clicked, could dial background calls to premium-rate numbers.
Apple, as stated in his SDK, allows native apps to place calls without your confirmation and while this can result in some unpleasant surprises if you’re inattentive or if your kids are playing with your iPhone, there is always the possibility to quickly hang-up.
But some of the users across couple of forums have discovered that clicking those (some) AdMob banners initiates the call in background giving users no way to hang up. Similarly to the auto-dial safari exploit that was fixed by Apple last year with iPhone OS 2.2. Here is how it looked like:
Do you really believe in the backgrounding part of the story?
What if it’s a new twist of the auto-dial exploit? Pretty serious, eh?
[via appadvice]