Newly Discovered Bug will Crash and Restart your iPhone
Simply visiting a website built by a security researcher will crash and restart your iPhone.
- By Sydny Shepard
- Sep 18, 2018
A security researcher and software engineer has found a new bug that can crash and restart an iPhone, according to Tech Crunch. Sabri Haddouche tweeted about the bug, a webpage with just 15 lines of code. Simply visiting the webpage is enough to crash and restart any smartphone or tablet made by Apple.
Haddouche posted the information on GitHub, including the source of the bug, which is just a few lines of CSS and HTML. Other users tested the webpage bug on macOS and Windows 7, where they reported the Safari app crashed and froze. Others said that visiting the webpage from Firefox on mobile and desktop did not crash their devices.
"Anything that renders HTML on iOS is affected," Haddouche told TechCrunch, which means that you will be affected by the bug if someone sends you the link via social media or email, or if you visit a webpage that includes the code.
According to 9to5Mac, "The computionally-expensive drawing overloads the WebKit renderer and the system cannot recover other than to kernel panic, crash to the Apple logo, and reboot." WebKit is the HTML layout engine used by the Safari browser, as well as Mail, App Store, and other apps on macOS, iOS and Linux.
About the Author
Sydny Shepard is the Executive Editor of Campus Security & Life Safety.