You Can Now Jailbreak Your iOS 7 iPhone & iPad, but You Totally Shouldn't—Here's Why

Update 1: Evad3ers have released a statement to the jailbreak community, claiming that the safety and security of their users is the most important thing to them and that all speculations about malware being encoded into the jailbreak is simply not true. You can read the full letter over at Evasi0n's site.

Update 2: Evad3rs have released a second statement that the Chinese app store is now gone and the jailbreak is safe.

Just in time for the holidays, the team over at Evasi0n have once again brought us a jailbreak program making it easy to jailbreak any iPhone or iPad running iOS 7.

YAY!!! WOO!! AHHHH!!!!! WE SHOULD BE ECSTATIC RIGHT?

WRONG

People have gone apeshit crazy on the interwebz after Saurik (of Cydia fame) revealed that the newest jailbreak contains disguised malware, sneakily installing a Chinese application store for Chinese users called Taig, replacing Cydia.

Image Credit digitaltrends.com

It seems that the Chinese software is full of pirated applications, is capable of disabling application signings, and can run privileged system processes that apparently have the potential to capture any of your data and send it elsewhere. To top it off, its code is heavily obfuscated—making it extremely difficult to reverse engineer and see what it's could potentially do.

According to a source at Evad3rs, Qihoo, a prominent Chinese company, has paid the people responsible for the Evasi0n jailbreak program a reported "high six figure"—thought to be close to a million dollars—to use their app store for users in China.

To make matters worse, Qihoo—the Chinese company responsible for Taig—are known to be quite the shady characters. They're notorious for their unusual tactics of secretly and forcibly employing their software to users, a far cry from the CEO's remarks that he wants the company to be the "the biggest web security company in the world".

Image Credit china.cn

In China, the government warned Qihoo about tricking users into downloading their web browser, bundled into their free security software. Anonymous Analytics have also called out the company for blatantly lying about traffic to their site, in order to lure in advertisers. Apple has even banned all of their applications from App Store.

So while it may be alluring to jailbreak your iOS 7 device, you should be fully aware of the possible issues and think twice before you make the decision, especially when a dodgy company is involved.

After all, nobody spends a million bucks without expecting something in return. We'll keep you updated as we learn more.

Photo by iFlowreader