Back in 2015 there was the infamous “Effective Power” bug on ios devices that caused iPhones to crash and restart. You would send a rather specific set of characters: ‘effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗’, and as long as your notifications were on there was no way to stop it.
Now in 2018 another bug has risen from the ashes and taken over your messages. From the Indian language Telegu, a character that is a unintelligible syllable is causing iPhones, iPads, and iMacs to crash as soon as the notification appears and persists until it is deleted or removed from ones account. From banners to texts to emails many third party apps can still send this character and affect one’s phone. With varying degrees of severity depending on the app this bug has caused some havoc and chaos.
Apple has released update 11.2.6 fixing the bug as of Monday the 19th. As per Apple’s support section, “Available for: iPhone 5s and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation.
Impact: Processing a maliciously crafted string may lead to heap corruption.
Description: A memory corruption issue was addressed through improved input validation”.