A web security researcher has issued a warning about a recently discovered bug that causes Apple iPhones and iPads to crash.
Typing these four characters: “”:: (two double quotes and two colons) into the App Library, accessed by swiping left multiple times or in the search bar of the Settings app, causes devices to lock and then reload the lock screen.
In some cases, the screen flashes black before the lock screen appears.
This is because typing the characters triggers a bug in the latest version of iOS 17 and the iOS 18 beta, due to an issue in how the software interprets the series of punctuation marks.
An expert reveals that typing this specific combination of characters can cause iPhones to instantly crash.
‘On your iPhone, swipe left through all the pages on the home screen to get to the App Library. Then, search for ‘::,’ said security researcher Konstantin (@kwpn). wrote on the social networking site Mastadon.
“Do it at your own risk,” he added.
So far, it seems the only way to trigger the error is to manually type these characters into the device.
It’s highly unlikely that a third party could cause this bug, meaning it’s probably not a security risk, experts said. TechnologyCrunch.
“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 doesn’t seem to cause any harm to the devices either, but the error… It could be a pain if you accidentally type these characters on your iPhone.
These four random characters are causing your phone to brick due to a flaw in the way iOS handles certain Unicode characters, according to Apple Magazine.
Unicode characters are an international character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to each character across all languages and scripts.
The software misinterprets these characters and causes a crash.
Apple is rumored to be preparing a minor update ahead of the release of iOS 18 in September.
The update, iOS 17.6.2, will likely 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 is not the first time that a specific combination of characters has caused errors on Apple devices.
‘Text bombs,’ malicious messages containing characters that can affect the operation of an app or device, have plagued iPhone users for years.
For example, the 2018 text bomb contained Unicode characters from the Indian language Telugu that caused Apple devices to stop working, but the bug was later fixed.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.