If you come across a link to crashsafari.com, you are advised not to open it on your iPhone, iPad or even Macs. Doing so will cause Safari application to crash, potentially causing your Apple device to restart.
In case, you want to try this out, just click here to visit the website and watch what happens. Currently, people are spreading the link to CrashSafari.com via Twitter using a URL shortener, and users are tricked into visiting the site without being knowing.
How does this Prank Work?
The prank website (crashsafari.com) generates a ridiculously long, and increasing string of characters and then overloads this text string in the address bar of Apple's default Safari browser.
CrashSafari site's code is very simple and includes:
- A Header Title that you will never actually see because the browser crashes.
- A small piece of JavaScript that calls the HTML5 History API thousands of times in a loop, potentially causing Safari to freeze.
Android Users are Vulnerable Too
Safari struggles to process the long string, causing the iPhone to heat up, crash and then reboot.
This same thing happens on iPads that also has Safari browser. However, even Android devices that run Chrome on it heat up and become sluggish, while visiting this website.
Desktop and Laptops Are Affected Too
Even desktop and laptop computers are also affected by this bug, but to a lesser degree depending on system's processing power. Visiting the website will cause Safari on a Mac to crash, showing 'Application Not Responding'.
Chrome on Macs and other computers also becomes not responding. However, restarting the Mac or quitting Chrome on Android devices, as well as rebooting iPhones and iPads, clears the issue.
The 'hack' is otherwise harmless, but it will likely cause you to lose all your open tabs. It works on the latest versions of Apple operating systems, iOS 9.2.1, OS X 10.11.3, as well as some of the beta seeds.
Apparently more than 150,000 people have fallen victim to just one abbreviated link alone. Apple has yet to comment on the issue.
