“A devastating ‘text bomb’ that crashes Apple devices has been uncovered by researchers,” Tim Collins reports for The Daily Mail. “It works by sending iPhones, iPads and Macs into a frenzy after a malicious web address is opened in Apple’s Message app.”
“The ChaiOS hack, which causes devices to crash and can delete all your messages, affects any device running iOS and Mac OS [sic],” Collins reports. “A fix for the issue, which is not the first text bomb to hit Apple, has not yet been created but is expected in future updates.”
“The flaw was discovered by software developer Abraham Masri, based in Chicago, who shared a link which can be used to crash the app on social media,” Collins reports. “It does so through massively long strings of text information, which overloads the system. Reported effects include freezing, crashes, restarts and resprings, a process which takes about 10 seconds and returns you to the Lock Screen.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As Graham Cluley writes, “Please, please don’t be tempted to try the text bomb attack out on anyone else – you’re not being funny, you’re just being a jerk.”
This isn;t the first and probably not the last. We expect a fix from Apple for this one, too, ASAP.
SEE ALSO:
Three-character message prank crashes pre-iOS 10.2 Apple iPhones with a single text – January 18, 2017
Random string of Arabic characters can crash nearly any Mac, iPhone or iPad – September 3, 2013