If
you’ve got an iPhone, and a particularly obnoxious group of friends,
you might want to avoid checking your text messages today.
That’s
because a new exploit has been found that lets someone send you a
specific line of text that can crash your iPhone’s Messages app, and in
some cases crash the phone entirely.
We’re
going to show the string of text as an image here, so that you and your
nasty friends can’t just copy it down and freeze each other’s phones.
If you really want to see the code, you can just find it on Reddit, or
Twitter with a quick search.
Ready? Here’s the text:
According to Gizmodo,
if you receive the text string, it will lock down your Messages app
until you receive a new message in the conversation. The second message
doesn’t have to be anything in particular. It can be gibberish or a
novella: As long as it’s sent to the same conversation it will repair
the lockout issue.
The Verge reports
that if you have your Messages app open when you receive the text, you
won’t be able to reopen the conversation without the app crashing. If
you get the text while on your phone’s lock screen, you won’t be able to
open the Messages app at all.
The site 9to5Mac
says that the text can crash some iPhones entirely, causing them to
reboot them without warning. And there’s a report that the nasty string
also works on messaging service WhatsApp, too.
Still, even that problem can be resolved if your awful friend sends you a second text.
The
problem, though, besides being incredibly annoying, is that a person
can send you the offending message, and, if he is a truly heartless
monster, decide not to send a second text to fix the error.
Thankfully,
9to5Mac says that you can send yourself a message using Siri or your
Mac to cancel out the affects of the illicit text.
This
isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, issue discovered with Apple’s
iOS, which many people say is far more secure than Google’s Android.
Take
for instance, the issues that resulted from downloading Apple’s iOS 8.1
update. The download caused everything from Wi-Fi problems to battery
issues for iPhone owners. But after receiving complaints, the company
fired off a new update in relatively short order.
Just last month, an exploit was discovered in Apple’s iOS operating system that let a hacker continuously restart a person’s iPhone or iPad as many times as they wanted if the person connected to a certain Wi-Fi hotspot.
The good news is that if past precedent holds, Apple is likely already aware of the text problem and hard at work on a fix.
via: Gizmodo, The Verge, 9to5Mac
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