iphone crash text - Online Cyber Security News

You Can Crash Anyone's iPhone Or iPad With A Simple Emoji Text Message

Wednesday, January 18, 2017 Swati Khandelwal

A newly discovered bug in Apple's iOS mobile operating system is being exploited in a prank that lets anyone crash your iPhone or iPad by just sending an emoji-filled iMessage, according to several reports.

YouTube star EverythingApplePro published a video highlighting a sequence of characters that temporarily freeze and restart an iPhone, which people can send to their iPhone buddies to trouble them. You can watch the video demonstration below.

Here's the first troublesome text: A white Flag emoji, the digit "0" and a Rainbow emoji.

This simple numeric character, flag, and rainbow emojis confuse iOS 10 devices when it tries to combine them into a rainbow flag.

As soon as this text is received, the iPhone's software attempts to combine the emojis but fails, and the messaging app crashes and eventually reboots in a few minutes. The recipients do not even have to open or read the message.

Video Demonstration

Another iPhone-crashing method involves the same characters, but saving them as a contact file and then sending that file to an iMessage contact via iCloud's sharing feature.

This, in turn, will crash the target's device, even if the victim has not manually opened the file.

Both the methods mentioned above will crash and iPhone or iPad to varying degrees, although the simple text string sent via a standard iMessage appears to affect iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.1 or below.

However, the boobytrapped contact card affects all versions of iOS 10, including Apple's latest iOS 10.2 operating system.

There is nothing you can do to protect yourself against this issue, as these iPhone-crashing issues have the ability to crash and reboot your iPhone or iPad without your interaction.

So, we hope that Apple releases a patch quickly to plug the issues, though the company has declined to comment on the issue.

This is not the first time EverythingApplePro has shared iOS-crashing issues. The YouTuber has a long history of reporting on iPhone crash pranks.

Warning — People are Sharing a Link that will Crash and Reboot your iPhone

Monday, January 25, 2016 Mohit Kumar

A new prank circulating on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platform could crash your iPhone or iPad completely.

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.

How to Fix iPhone Crash Text Message Bug

Saturday, May 30, 2015 Swati Khandelwal

We reported you about a new bug in the core component of iOS and OS X that causes the device's Messages app to crash and iPhones to reboot if it receives a certain string of characters, Arabic characters, via text message.

Many have since fallen victims to this specially crafted sequence of Unicode bug. It is believed that when this malicious string of characters is sent in a text message, it will crash an iThing when the text is displayed as a notification on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple watch.

Not iMessages alone, Snapchat and Twitter on iOS devices are also vulnerable to this iPhone crash text bug as they also use the CoreText component to display text on-screen.

Here's the unique text that's causing the iPhone crash:

effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗

It's been really annoying that people all across the world are messaging each other the secret string of unique characters that resets the phone, causing it to turn on and off.

There isn't any official fix from Apple so far, however the company has released a statement saying how to fix your crashed phone if it is sent the malicious text.

"Apple is aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of Unicode characters, and we will make a fix available in a software update," the company says. "Until the update is available, you can use these steps to re-open the Messages app."

Here's a three-step process to combat the issue:

You can do this simple workaround in the meantime before Apple patches the bug in order to open your Messages app:

Ask Siri to "read unread messages."
Use Siri to reply to the malicious message. After you reply, you'll be able to open Messages again.
If the issue continues, tap and hold the malicious message, tap More, and delete the message from the thread.

Following these simple steps would let you successfully access your Messages again. However, this procedure will provide only a temporary fix for the iPhone crash text bug.

Apple has yet to release an update to fully address the issue exploited by the killer Unicode string, and hopefully we get a real fix for this issue soon.