Siri, please, please save my iPhone from the messages of death

[space-time]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/29/...ple_reset/

[Wags]

How thoughtful that they publish the malicious line of code.

[silvarios]

Wags wrote:
How thoughtful that they publish the malicious line of code.

Will it cause the browser to crash as well? Otherwise, why not?

[gabester]

silvarios wrote:
[quote=Wags]
How thoughtful that they publish the malicious line of code.

Will it cause the browser to crash as well? Otherwise, why not?
I've heard that getting the code correctly entered and sent to a given iPhone is rather difficult, so the perception is that publishing accurate unicode is facilitating miscreants' abilities to trivially annoy others.

You CAN disable notifications for affected apps if you get attached as a workaround. Too bad you can't just say, "Siri, disable notifications for "

THAT would truly be useful, when you can use speech to modify the device settings without having to go in and tweak them by touch.

[space-time]

The code shows up as an image, I don't think you can copy and paste it, can you? I have no idea how to even type it even if I wanted to.

[JoeBob]

My teenage son and his friends are delightfully sending this text to one another
and disguising it with some sort of header, so that they don't see it coming.
Kids.

[Speedy]

"Apple is aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update," the Cupertino giant said in a statement.

The text causes Apple's CoreText library to read from invalid memory, forcing the kernel to blow away the currently running app. A pointer to data ends up with the wild low value of 0x04, triggering a fatal page fault."

I hope the fix in software update includes a version for iOS 6.

[RAMd®d]

There are many fixes so even if publication encourages the disabling of Messages, it's pretty easy to get back up and running.

I hope people read and concentrate on the fixes more than the "Apple phones are hacked" scare tactics.

[gabester]

Speedy wrote:
"Apple is aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update," the Cupertino giant said in a statement.

I hope the fix in software update includes a version for iOS 6.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204897

Citing the KB from Apple because some people might want to know whether they should expect an update to iOS...

[silvarios]

gabester wrote:
I've heard that getting the code correctly entered and sent to a given iPhone is rather difficult, so the perception is that publishing accurate unicode is facilitating miscreants' abilities to trivially annoy others.

That seems like a silly perception. Better to know than remain ignorant of a security problem, no?