Thursday 5 January 2017

Apple iPhone bug causes iMessage app to freeze, crash

A new bug has been revealed for Apple iMessage that causes the app to freeze. YouTube user vincedes3 posted a video on his channel demonstrating how a vcf attachment sent on iPhone running on iOS 8 to 10.2.1 makes your iMessage vulnerable to the bug. Clicking on the malicious message, which is basically a large vcf file, will cause iMessage app to freeze. You can dismiss iMessage from recently used apps on your iPhone, but reopening will cause it to crash.
“When you click, iOS want to read the text, the text in the file is very complicated for the system and cause a CPU average: the app freeze. You close the app, want to reopen but iOS want to reload the previous message but can’t because it’s the vcf file,” vincedes3 explains on his site.

However, he has provided a ‘magical link’ on the site, which he claims will make the bug go away, restoring iMessage app to normal. However, he has warned the fix (link) doesn’t work for some iPad devices. Users will need to open the given link on Safari browser. The link then starts to fix your app and you receive a message in the end that says, “‘I have just save you’re iPhone bro ;-)”
The exploit is particularly destructive in that restarting the Messages app, or even the iPhone, is ineffective, unless the owner looks to Vincedes3’s blog post for a solution.
Along with access to a copy of the vCard, Vincedes3 has thankfully detailed multiple ways of restoring the iOS device to normal. The exploit works on the premise that Apple’s iOS will always try to open the most recently opened text. By sending yourself a message and then opening it via Siri, the exploit will move down the list of messages and become ineffective. Alternatively, the hacker has supplied a link which can be opened in Safari to restore the iOS device to normal.
This is not the first bug facing iOS devices in recent times. A five-second video was shared by YouTube channel EverythingApplePro, and viewing it on Safari caused iOS to crash. However, the bug wasn’t limited to one iOS build.
In May last year there was a bug which caused iPhones running iOS 8.3 to crash when a message containing a specific string of text was received. Apple had later issued a software fix for the bug. The Cupertino giant is likely to do the same this time around as well.

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