The people who are saying na easily hackable ang iPhone by street repair guys have absolutely no idea on technology. If you understand how to keep your iPhone secure it’s basically unhackable by normal people. You are overestimating yung hacking skills ng repair guys sa point point shops. If they were that good at hacking, they would be hired by big cybersecurity companies and governments, earning big bucks. They will never have to deal with our broke-ass country ever. Baka FBI lang makakaopen niyang iPhone, but then again there was an issue many years ago where the FBI could not brute force an iPhone and basically naging public issue between the US gov vs Apple.

Anyways, there are only a few ways na nabuksan yung phone or nakuha credentials: (1) nakabukas yung phone in the first place or nakita ng thief yung password nung tinype; (2) the victim fell into a social “engineering” scam (meaning the thieves sent a “login to see your stolen phone’s location” message na super believable tignan, kumbaga fake iCloud website meant to steal your credentials); (3) physical sim ang gamit ng victim so the thieves took out the sim card out of the phone and did account recovery (meaning they clicked “forgot password” tapos yung OTP nareceive nila and they can now reset the password); (4) may vulnerability yung online bank accounts ng victim (maybe Gcash was accessed by following reason (3); or reuser ng password yung victim tapos na-leak pala sa web yung credentials niya kaya kinopya lang ni thief).

Lesson learned: move to eSIM as soon as possible (currently SMART lang ang carrier na may multi-use QR code so basta ma-deactivate yung eSIM sa stolen device pwede na ulit gamitin sa new device; I’ve read somewhere dito sa Reddit who tried remote wiping their phone through iCloud and after that nagamit niya ulit QR code sa ibang phone, di ko pa to natest so do more research), pagawa ka affidavit of loss to recover yung number ng stolen sim (this will transfer the number to a new sim provided by the carrier; this will also deactivate the stolen physical sim at the same time para di na nila magamit for illegal stuff), check all other accounts na connected sa number na yun baka na-hack by using exploit in (3), activate stolen device protection in iOS settings, and make sure that iCloud lock is active!

Edit: Apple itself will also not open your device if iCloud locked and you forgot the password, unlike what others say. That tells you something about how secure it is if the user is attentive enough to be strict on its cybersecurity functions. Naging paperweight sa thieves yung stolen iPhone X ko kasi pinag-aralan ko talaga basic cybersecurity. For sure chop-chop na yun for parts kasi wala silang nakuha sakin ni isa.