Apple: iPhone Jailbreaking could Break Cell Phone Towers

According to Apple, you should think twice before jailbreaking your iPhone to run software that hasn't been approved for distribution through the iPhone App Store. Should you decide to do it anyway, cellphone towers could come under "potentially catastrophic" cyberattacks, Apple says.

In a filing with the Copyright Office, which is considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the practice of jailbreaking, Apple wrote:

"A local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data. Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer -- to potentially catastrophic result."

Apple went on to say that the technological protection measures in the iPhone were specifically designed to avoid such scenarios, and jailbreaking would undo all of that.

Fred von Lohmann, the EFF attorney who has requested that consumers have the legal right to jailbreak iPhones, isn't buying Apple's claims.

"As far as I know, nothing like that has ever happened," Lohmann said in an interview. "This kind of theoretical threat is more FUD than truth."