
Recently, a bug was discovered which could "brick" your 64 bit iOS device where setting the date back to January 1, 1970 would brick your device. Unfortunately, a restore will not work and other methods have been put to rest also.
As many people now have the knowledge of the bug, the risk has never been greater than it is right now that someone with malicious intent could grab your iPhone while you’re not looking and set your date back to the dangerous date to brick your device on you.
Fortunately, a new free tweak called BrickDate is available in Cydia that can protect you from having your date changed to the dangerous date. Although you do have to jailbreak to install this, Apple has acknowledged the bug and will most likely update their firmware in the future to prevent the bug. Apple posted their support documentation to this website.
What the tweak does is it prevents your date and time from being manually set back to the dangerous date, which is January 1, 1970. The bricking would normally occur when your device is set to this time period, and then you attempt to reboot it, after which it will reportedly not turn back on. Many users have said that even a DFU mode restore will not fix this problem.
Preventing your device from this bug is effective as you never know who may use your iPhone when laying around and prevents the chance of your device being bricked.
The tweak will add a preferences pane to the Settings app where you can toggle it on or off, and can kill the Settings app to save your changes.
BrickDate is a free download from Cydia’s BigBoss repository.
We have not tested whether or not it will work, as we are not game enough to try bricking our devices.
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