When you turn off your iPhone, it does not totally shut down.

Several physical components, including the chipset, are awake and functioning on low energy to make your iPhone easily searchable when you use the Find My feature, as well as to allow you to use your credit card and car keys even if the battery has died.

This is a useful feature, yet it has the potential to be abused. Researchers have developed a virus that can infect an iPhone even while it is turned off.

The iPhone’s Bluetooth chip, which is responsible for geolocation via the Find My network, cannot digitally sign or encrypt the code it runs, according to experts at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt.

Researchers were able to take advantage of the chip’s inability to execute malware that allowed them to track the iPhone’s position or activate new capabilities while it was switched off.

This is one of the earliest, if not the first, studies to look into the dangers of always-on chipsets in low-power mode.

This is not the same as iOS’s low-power mode, which allows you to save battery life, but a hardware-oriented feature known as LPM, which allows near-field communication (NFC), ultra-wideband (UWB), and Bluetooth chips to work in a special mode in which they are turned on 24 hours even if the device is turned off.

“The current LPM implementation on Apple iPhones is opaque and adds new threats,” researchers said.

“Since LPM support is based on the iPhone’s hardware, it cannot be removed with system updates. Thus, it has a long-lasting effect on the overall iOS security model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first who looked into undocumented LPM features introduced in iOS 15 and uncover various issues.”

Researchers claimed that they alerted Apple of their findings, but that no response was received by the academics.

The researchers then considered making their findings public.

Hopefully, this will prompt Apple to investigate any potential concerns with its iPhones and begin working on solutions.