‘Full copy of iOS 14 is already circulating among hackers and researchers’

A copy of iOS 14 has leaked. Several security researchers and hackers have had access to the operating system since at least February, Motherboard writes. There are no new details about the OS, other than what leaked earlier.

Motherboard writes that a full copy of the operating system has been circulating among hackers and security researchers for weeks and possibly even months. It’s not sure where that copy came from, but several Motherboard sources say it comes from a developer’s model of the iPhone 11 that was allegedly purchased in China. There, the OS would have been removed one-to-one from the device and distributed in limited circles.

That would have happened in December of last year, the site writes. Motherboard couldn’t verify that, but it did confirm that one of the copies has been circulating since February anyway. iOS 14 is expected to be officially released in September.

With a copy of iOS in their hands, security researchers can look for potential vulnerabilities in the system early on. That could theoretically lead to a jailbreak. Jailbreaks were rare in many recent versions of iOS, but with the current versions of iOS 13 and recent iPhones, more and more jailbreaks are possible.