Urgent warning: Don’t type these characters or your iPhone will crash
A web security researcher has issued a warning about a newly discovered bug that causes Apple iPhones and iPads to crash.
If you type these four characters: “”:: (two double quotes and two colons) into the App Library (which you can access by swiping left multiple times or through the search bar in the Settings app), the device will crash and reload to the lock screen.
In some cases, the screen flashes black before the lock screen appears.
That’s because typing the characters is causing a bug in the latest version of iOS 17 and the beta version of iOS 18. This issue is due to an issue in the way the software interprets the string of punctuation marks.
According to an expert, typing this specific combination of characters can cause iPhones to instantly crash.
‘On your iPhone, swipe left through all the pages on your home screen to access the App Library. Then look for ‘::’, security researcher Konstantin (@kwpn) wrote on the social networking site Mastadon.
“Do it at your own risk,” he added.
So far, it appears that the bug can only be triggered by manually typing the characters into your device.
According to experts, it is highly unlikely that a third party could trigger this bug, meaning it is unlikely to pose a security risk. TechCrunch.
“It’s not a security bug,” said Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug. Patrick Wardle, another iOS security researcher, agreed.
It also doesn’t seem to cause any damage to devices, but the bug can be annoying if you accidentally type these characters into your iPhone.
These four random characters are causing your phone to crash due to a bug in the way iOS handles certain Unicode characters, according to Apple Magazine.
Unicode characters are an international standard for character encoding that assigns a unique number to each character, regardless of language and script.
The software misinterprets these characters and causes a crash.
Rumor has it that Apple is preparing a minor update in preparation for the iOS 18 rollout in September.
The update, iOS 17.6.2, is likely to bring bug fixes, security patches, and improvements to users.
So there is a chance that iOS 17.6.2 will fix this new bug.
This isn’t the first time a specific combination of characters has caused bugs on Apple devices.
iPhone users have been plagued for years by “text bombs”: malicious messages containing characters that can affect the operation of an app or device.
For example, the 2018 text bomb contained Unicode characters from the Indian language Telugu, which caused Apple devices to crash. However, the bug was later fixed.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.