Bug enables you to crash almost anyone’s iPhone

An iPhone vulnerability going viral online can cause the phone to crash when it receives a seemingly jibberish message.

The vulnerability in the latest version of iOS causes a phone to crash when it receives a series of Arabic letters and symbols through the Messages app.

Channel 4 News has found that even sending a tweet to someone with the message can cause their phone to crash.

If the receiver has banner notifications turned on on their iPhone it enables the sender to crash the user’s phone, or cause the Messages app to stop working for a short time.

The vulnerability only seems to affect iPhones updated with the latest operating system.

An Apple spokesperson told Channel 4 News: “We are aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update.”

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Your iPhone could be crashed by anyone thanks to this bug.The newly identified bug causes the phone to restart when receiving certain Unicode symbols in a text message.Find out more: http://bit.ly/1RnTtZN

Posted by Channel 4 News on Wednesday, 27 May 2015

Fixes

Users online have suggested that it’s possible to fix the flaw by going into notification settings and turning off the ‘Banner’ notification settings, which seems to be the reason for the bug.

Speculation online suggest the bug may be linked to a memory problem, which creates infinite characters, taking up much more memory than usual, and crashing the phone.

A similar bug in November 2013 similarly caused a crashe.

One user on Twitter suggested that Apple had confirmed that their engineers are working on a fix.