Trigger messages began being circulated in Telegram messages, and quickly went viral on Twitter, with many pranksters posting tweets containing the text-bomb content.Īpple has had similar linguistic issues in the past in 2013, certain combinations of Arabic characters were found to crash Macs and iPhones while in 2018, messages containing letters of the south Indian language of Telugu were discovered to do the same thing.
The issue was first reported on Reddit on Thursday, and given the moniker “CapturetheFlag” because the offending characters are often paired with the Italian flag (the flag though is not necessary to trigger a crash). As for the latter point, Threatpost editors were able to independently confirm that looking at tweets containing the characters will indeed shut down an iPhone.Ĭluley noted that completely rebooting the device fixes the problem – until another booby-trapped message comes along. Viewing messages within apps leads to the same outcome, as does reading social media posts on one’s phone or Mac. The problem occurs in a number of different scenarios, including if the character string shows up in a text message – in fact, just looking at a message notification containing a message preview will crash the system. Because the symbol confuses the operating systems, according to a Friday post from researcher Graham Cluley at Bitdefender, the devices simply spontaneously crash when it shows up in a viewing window.
The bug affects iPhone, iPad, Macs and Apple Watches, and arises from macOS and iOS failing to properly render a Unicode symbol used when writing in the language. Sindhi is an official language used in Pakistan. Sindhi-language characters can crash iPhones and other iOS/macOS devices if a victim views texts, Twitter posts or messages within various apps containing them, ThreatPost reported.Īpple devices are vulnerable to a “text bomb” attack where simply looking at messages or posts containing characters in the Sindhi language can crash devices. After several bugs annoyed iOS users in the last decade, a new string of text using Sindhi characters has seemingly been discovered that, when sent to an iOS device in a notification, it will cause the device to freeze, requiring a hard reset to return it to normal. Strings of texts that cause iPhones and iOS devices to crash isn't a new problem, but a new one has appeared in 2020.
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