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THERE’S A NASTY new iPhone bug doing the rounds: It’s a string of characters that, when sent in a message, crashes the recipient’s phone.
We first heard about the issue on 9to5Mac, and it apparently affects only iPhone-to-iPhone communication. After receiving a text with the particular string of characters, Messages will reportedly crash repeatedly. It can also force iPhones to reboot in some circumstances.
Here’s the text that is reportedly causing the bug:
effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗
For what it’s worth, we’ve tried to replicate the bug and can’t manage it – suggesting that it doesn’t necessarily affect all iPhones. But comments on social media show that it’s definitely for an issue for many:
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Someone sent that message that makes your iPhone turn off to make me text back.. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my phone 😑
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It appears to be caused because the ‘banner notification’ shits itself when displaying that particular Unicode text. It’s more-so to do with the banner notification for a text message. I would imagine you would get this problem with Whatsapp also.
It may look like an Arabic word but I’ve talked to two friends one Persian and one Lebanese and they both say that it makes no sense, it’s the Persian alphabet with some Arabic letters, basically if you put it into a translator it is translated as lljjhksksjwhw which is basically what it is, I think the second part is what is causing some of the issues.
Probably a hack that once used renders the phone open to attack by disabling passwords when the hacker sends a certain code. Being sent this way does two things 1) gets it past security settings and virus scans, 2) gets spread by everyone trying it to see what happens.
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