by Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
A string of text that crashes Apple devices via iMessage will also cause glitches in the device if sent through Twitter or Snapchat, a cybersecurity expert reported Friday.
Following reports on online forums like Reddit, it was revealed earlier this week that a text message, a nonsensical string of English, Arabic, Marathi and Chinese characters, could cause an iPhone to instantly crash and reboot if received as a notification. Soon after the bug was reported, researchers found it also affected other Apple devices including iPads, Macs and the newly released Apple Watch.
The issue appears to stem from the way iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, renders Arabic text.
Researcher Mikko Hypponen told The Guardian in a report published Friday that the text can cause issues with iPhones if sent by a direct message or a public mention on Twitter. If users have push notifications turned on, the bug has the same effect as if sent by text message.
Hypponen also said the text can permanently crash an iPhone if sent through a Snapchat text message and the recipient reads it, meaning the entire chat history cannot be opened without crashing the smartphone. While the message cannot be deleted, chatting with other Snapchat users can resume.
Apple on Friday released a temporary fix for the bug that involves using Siri to read messages. The company also promised a permanent solution in an upcoming iOS update but didn’t say when the new software would be available.
“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 California-based company noted.
While some are disabling notifications on their devices in order to avoid device crashes, there haven’t been any malicious attacks using the bug reported — although plenty of users have jokingly attempted to crash the iPhones of friends and family.
