In a surprising turn of events, a curious string of text has been found to be causing iPhones to crash, shedding light on a peculiar bug in Apple’s iOS operating system. This latest flaw was discovered by a security researcher at Mastodon, who demonstrated that entering a specific sequence of characters into Spotlight Search or the App Library on an iPhone would cause an immediate crash. The problematic text string is as simple as this: “” followed by any other character.
As detailed in a recent TechCrunch report, you only need to type the combination of “”: with any fourth character to trigger the accident. However, experts have assured users that the issue poses no security threat and stressed that there is no indication that anyone other than the iPhone owner manually entering these characters could exploit the flaw.
To find out more, 9to5Mac conducted tests on various iPhone models and iOS versions. Their findings show that in the last few iOS 17Entering the wrong characters causes the iPhone’s home screen interface, known as Springboard, to crash and quickly restart. For those using iOS 18 or iOS 18.1, the bug causes Spotlight Search to briefly crash, but stops short of crashing the entire interface.
This issue is limited to scenarios where the text string is written as an int.o Featured Search or the App Library search bar directly from the Home screen. While this is an annoying bug, it is not unprecedented in Apple’s history.
So far, Apple has not released an official statement regarding this newly discovered bug. However, the company is usually quick to fix such flaws via software updates. Given the rare nature of someone intentionally writing source code,and “”:: stringThis issue is likely more of a rarity than a major concern for most users. As always, users can expect a fix to be implemented in an upcoming iOS update.
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Posted: Aug 22, 2024, 10:56 pm IST
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