Apple having tough time dealing with a bug.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Apple is having real tough time dealing with bugs in iOS. Now, a new bug found in iPhone’s message has also been found affecting the company’s new Apple Watch, iPads and Mac systems.
The new message bug in iPhone makes the device to crash when it receives a garbled text message. The issue has been identified as a bug in the core system of the Apple’s iOS based devices that can read text messages.
Apple devices crash on receiving text messages that have non-Latin characters in a distinctive string; this includes characters from Arabic, Chinese and Indian language Marathi. On receiving messages with specific sequence from these languages, the core system of the device fails to execute it, thus bringing the device to a standstill.
Apple has spoken out about the issue saying that the company is aware about it and will roll out a software update as soon as possible to rectify it. Now, 24 hours have passed after the identification of the bug but, till now, no update has been released by the Cupertino-based tech giant.
Causing more tension to Apple is the revelation that the same bug is causing its latest Apple Watch to crash. According to users, Apple Watch crashes when trying to reply to these messages via voice using Siri.
Similar issues have been reported by users of iPads and Mac Laptops and desktops.
Mathew Hickey , principal security consultant at MDSec was quoted by Forbes saying, “As the issue also affects OS X applications, a malicious party could set the triggering text as a server message of the day or welcome message, causing a user’s terminal to crash when authenticating to network services.”
As the news about the offending message became viral, more people are spreading it for prank leading to more Apple devices to crash. Experts are not denying the fact that these kinds of text message strings could lead to malicious attacks in the future, leading to more disturbing consequences.
According to experts, the current error caused by a bug in Unicode decoding and rendering can be used by perverts to access the device for malicious purposes. Thankfully, as of now, no such cases have been reported but, they caution the existence of such vulnerabilities that could cause severe threat to all iOS devices and its users worldwide.
As an immediate measure, those who want to safeguard their Apple Watch from these kinds of unauthorized access can turn off the notification system and stop messages (SMS’s) from being delivered to Apple Watch.