Wednesday, May 27, 2015

[Solved] iPhone iMessage crashes with a small arabic text message saying "effective Power ..."

There are bugs in iOS, some of which only hackers can exploit. But sometimes, there comes a simple bug in iPhones that can easily be replicated by anyone.

effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗 iPhone bug



This can easily be used to prank your friends using iPhones. If you send the following as a text message or Whatsapp message to anybody with an iPhone, it just restarts or crashes.

"effective. Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗"

For it to work, the victim should not have the messaging app open at the time. It should come as a notification.

It seems to be because the Apple notifications cannot handle some of those characters and crashes.






How to fix the effective power arabic bug in iPhone?

Very simple.

Reply to the person from Siri. (This is the easiest, if you can access Siri)


OR
send a photo to them from the gallery app.
Basically, use any other messaging capable app to send a reply so that it no longer shows up in notifications.

Also check out Best iPhone and Android Alarm apps
Check your Heart Rate with your iPhone
OR

Disable notifications (If the prankster keeps on sending the message)
Settings--> Notifications--> Messages--> and change to no notifications
OR

Go to safe mode. First switch your iPhone off. Then keep the home button and power button pressed till it starts up. In safe mode, iPhone loads only essential apps and stops rebooting continuously. Then you can delete the message from the iPhone or using your Mac.

Apple may release a fix for this soon, but many people may not update their OS for a long time. So use this knowledge responsibly.



Here is another very similar text that is supposed to crash iOS browser Safari.
https://zhovner.com/tmp/killwebkit.html

سمَـَّوُوُحخ ̷̴̐خ ̷̴̐خ ̷̴̐خ امارتيخ ̷̴̐خ


Please check out this post too : Check your Heart Rate with your iPhone and these FREE apps

Here is a bunch of Best iPhone and Android Alarm appsHave you tried out the alarm app Wakie - a stranger calls and wakes you up

Update : May 28th, 2015
Apple Confirms A Fix Is In The Works For The Bug That Crashes iPhones By Way Of Text Message


Technical details of how the bug works :

A 75-byte sequence of unicode characters triggers the glitch, and can be smuggled into text messages, causing iThings to crash if they appear in the victim’s notification screen. Texting the data to your pals will force their devices to reboot if they try to open it from the notification panel.

The string-of-death crashes applications that use Apple’s CoreText library. OS X is vulnerable, too, so sticking the killer sequence in your server’s /etc/motd file will crash Terminal when a Mac user logs in, for example.

The flaw was spotted by a Redditor who received the message, which caused their smartphone to crash and reboot to recover. The attack has been replicated on other iOS devices such as Apple’s smartwatch.

The problem isn’t with the Arabic characters themselves, but in how the unicode representing them is processed by CoreText, which is a library of software routines to help apps display text on screens.

The bug causes CoreText to access memory that is invalid, which forces the operating system to kill off the currently running program: which could be your text message app, your terminal, or in the case of the notification screen, a core part of the OS.


Update :
Does your iPhone keeps restarting without giving time to change settings ? this should work.
  • Enter Safe Mode
  • Hold power and Home button until the screen goes black then remove finger from home while continuing to hold power. Once you see the Apple logo-hold the volume up button until the safe mode loads. 
  • Disable message notifications as shown in the image above
  • To exit safe mode, simply restart the iPhone suing power button
OR

  • Let your iPhone power down
  • Connect to your mac and delete the message from iMessage
  • Restart

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