Original Story: The next time your iPhone
shuts down for no apparent reason, it might not be a lack of charge or a
dodgy app, but some joker sending you a text message. There is a
(sightly shonky) fix, though.
A bug has been discovered that could enable a prankster to
send a victim a text message 75 characters long that triggers the fault.
When received, as soon as the dodgy message appears on the notification
screen, the iPhone reboots itself.
The glitch was spotted
on Tuesday by a Reddit user. They got the message which caused their
smartphone to instantly crash. The attack also appears to affect the
Apple Watch as well as Macs running OS X.
However, the good news
is that there is a workaround. Send yourself a message without using the
Messages app - via Siri or from a Mac, for instance - and Messages
should be safe to reopen. Alternatively, if you can convince whoever
sent you the "killer text" to send you another message (assuming they've
somehow done it by mistake rather than maliciously) that also fixes the
problem.
Apple has told 9to5Mac that it's working on a solution -
it's hard to imagine there'll be a long delay before it deploys,
somehow.
The text message looks like it contains Arabic
characters, but that’s not inherently the problem (otherwise iPhones
wouldn’t sell that well in the Middle East). The issue lies in how the
Unicode representing them gets processed by a library of software
routines that help apps display screen text. This is called CoreText.
As
the message confuses the iPhone, it doesn’t know what to do, so shuts
itself down. The bug is not limited to iMessages on the iPhone, other
messaging apps, such as WhatsApp are also affected.
In the meantime, a lot of Android jokers will be sending Apple fanboys dodgy texts and laughing loudly at them.
UPDATED: Apple is still working on a permanent solution, but in the meantime here is the company's official tempory fix:
- 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.
-
In Messages, swipe left to delete the entire thread. Or tap and hold
the malicious message, tap More, and delete the message from the thread.
UPDATED #2: It appears the bug also works in messages sent through social networking services Twitter and Snapchat.
Chief research officer at F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, has shown the same flaw working in separate apps.
Hypponen discovered that a message on these services containing exactly the same offending characters can crash an iOS device.
In order for the bug to work, notifications must be turned on and character must show up in a pop-up notification.
This is slightly easier to fix, simply turning the device back on will work.
