Apple’s mobile operating system has been found to have a bug that is being used in pranks that allow anyone to crash your iPhone or iPad using just a simple emoji-filled message, says several reports.
Celebrity Youtuber, EverythingApplePro posted a video that highlights a sequence of emojis that cause the phone to freeze and restart. People are sending this to their friends to prank then.
The first problematic text includes: a white flag emoji, the digit “0” and a Rainbow emoji.
Although this is just a single numeric character, flag, and a rainbow emojis, they have made iPhones restart when they try to combine them as a rainbow flag.
Once the text arrives, the iPhone’s OS attempts to combine the emojis as one but is unable to, resulting in the crashing of the messaging app, followed by the rebooting of the phone. For this bug to work, there is no need for the recipient to even open the message.
There is another iPhone crash and this one involves the same character, but this time saving them into a contact file before sending it to an iMessage recipient through iClouds sharing facility. This will lead to the crash of the target’s iPhone without the victim having to open the contact file.
Both these methods if unleashing the bug will affect the iPhones and iPads with different severity. However, devices running on os 10.1 or earlier versions seem to be the most affected by the text bug.
The troublesome contact card, however, affects all the installments of iOS 10 along with the very latest iOS 10.2.
iPhone users cannot do anything to protect themselves against the attacks since the iPhone’s crash and reboot without the user having to do anything. The company has not as of yet made any comments on the issue. However it can only be hoped that the company will soon build a patch to fix the issue.
