There’s a new bug on the block, and it’s making all the iPhone users on planet Earth freaking scare of getting it. That’s the bad news. The good news is, it only allows an iPhone users to crash another person’s iPhone. Okay, maybe that’s not such a good news after all. Seriously, here’s the good news – the bug is not really that serious, so much so that you can actually target someone you dislike as part of a prank.

 

Apparently, the new Apple (Nasdaq: Stock, AAPL) iOS bug crashes another iPhone by simply sending a text message. This “special text”, when received on an iPhone, will cause the supposedly smartphone to continuously crash and reboot without notice. Even if your iPhone is in lock screen mode, it will still crash it.

Amazingly, the special text is composed of a string of specific Arabic characters, of which when you send it from an iPhone to another iPhone, it causes the crash. Unless you’ve been sending and receiving texts in Arabic on daily basis, chances are high you won’t get such malicious bug, unless your friends specifically targeting you for such a prank.

 

When the bug issue was opened for discussion on Reddit message board, it was explained that somehow Apple iOS’s handling of Unicode has gone bonkers. Just like a badly written programming code, one of the Unicode values in the text goes on an infinite loop, sucking up more memory than usual hence forcing iOS to kill it, just like how certain JavaScript crashes browser (*grin*).

Here’s the special text, in case you wish to play a prank or annoy somebody, or simply to stop your nagging girl-friends, boy-friends, gay-friends from their continuous assaults (hints: the message must be in three separate lines to work):

 

Power

لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ

冗

 

However, the above text does not affect all iPhone models. So far, it doesn’t affect iPhone 4, most probably because it’s on lower version of iOS. Also, if you’re viewing the conversation while you send it, it doesn’t work. The phone only crashes or reboot when the message is received as a drop down notification or in the lock screen. The bug occurs from Notification Center, not messages, so you may want to turn off notification, for now.

But how do you go around fixing this problem, if you keep receiving this text from some jokers targeting you? Clearly, you can have the person who sent you the malicious message send another message effectively cancelling out the initial strand. Another option is to send yourself a message via Siri or Mac

 

To send yourself a text message using Siri, simply tell the digital assistant “send a message to myself” followed by a simple message such as “WTF”. You can also text yourself a picture from within the Photos app. But if you receive it in a group, you’ve to get the sender to send you a sample picture and then had one of them remove you and re-add you.

Interestingly, this is not the first time Apple is vulnerable to such bug though. Two years ago, a string of Arabic characters crashed applications in OS X 10.8 and iOS 6. Further back in 2009, an SMS bug on iOS 3.0 had allowed others to remotely execute code on the recipients’ phone.

As of now, Apple claims its engineers are aware of the problem and are working on a fix. We’re not recommending this, but in the meantime, perhaps you wanna try the text on ISIS, Obama, Putin or even Najib or Rosmah, assuming they do use iPhone in the first place, just to test if the bug really works (*tongue-in-cheek*).

 

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May 28th, 2015 by financetwitter

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