Hacked

This New Crashsafari.com Bug Can Crash Anyone’s Smartphone And Computer


Image | Apple

Short Bytes: After the mischievous 16-character Google Chrome bug, it’s time to bear the nonsense of crashsafari.com bug. This prank website forces your iPhone to reboot and causes other smartphone and desktop browsers to hang. You are advised to take extra care as it’s being spread on social media via shortened links.

There’s a notorious link being shared on social networking websites that can crash nearly all smartphones — all you have to do is just click on this link. Known as crashsafari.com (clicking on this will crash your browser), this link crashes your browser by overloading it with thousands of characters in the address bar each second. As a result, the phone memory exhausts and your device crashes.

Back in September, we encountered a  similar bug in Google Chrome that caused the browser to crash with just 16 characters. This website link is being spread via apps, social networks, simple URLs, and shortened URLs. It should be noted that this bug isn’t malicious and it doesn’t break anything in your phone.

Devices affected by Crashsafari.com:

The bug hits iPhone’s Safari browser in the worst manner possible. If you click on the link, it crashes your iPhone 6S or iPhone 5S running iOS version 9.2.1 or a regular iPhone 6 running iOS 9.2. After about 20 seconds, it’ll force the iPhone to reboot and heat up the device.

Even though the new bug is called crashsafari, it affects Android phones and Google Chrome as well. Apart from phones, this bug also affects desktop browsers if your computer doesn’t have enough RAM and CPU power.

How does Crashsafari.com work?

The website is running a small piece of JavaScript that creates a loop with the help of History API and crashes your device. The History API allows the websites to change the URL of the page without performing page refresh.

If you are an iPhone user, you should be very careful about any new incoming shortened links as they could forcibly reboot your phones. Notably, these links have already been opened 100,000 times. You are advised to take extra care as it’s being spread on the web via misleading links.

Also read: Hackers Win $1 Million Bounty for Remotely Hacking iPhones Running iOS 9

To Top

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This