Short Bytes: A new iPhone crashing exploit is here to take down and break your iMessages app. Hacker Vincedes3 has uncovered a hack that overloads your phone’s vCard that’s used for exchanging contact information. The hacker has also shared some fixes, which can be found on his blog.
The iPhone text message crashes are becoming increasingly common these days. Back in November, we told you about a creepy video link that crashed any iPhone in seconds. Thanks to a new hack in town, all Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, or iPod) running iOS 8 or later are vulnerable to crash.
This hack was discovered by hacker Vincedes3. It was also covered by the popular YouTuber EverythingApplePro who tried and tested it on multiple devices.
Disclaimer: The information shared ahead is just for educational purposes. Fossbytes isn’t responsible if it breaks your device.
Here’s the iPhone text message crash in action:
How does iPhone Messages app crash work?
Basically, the message shown here contains lots of text. When it’s loaded by iOS, it freezes the app. As you close the app and reopen it, iOS again tries to fetch the message and fails. Thus, the exploit works on the principle that iOS always tries to open the most recently opened text.
This is done by overloading the vCard, which is used to exchange contact information, with lots of data. The exploit uses a contact with about 14,281 lines of code, which is about 70 times the code found in an average vCard.
In his blog post, the hacker has detailed the exploit and instructions. If you’re willing to give it a try, do so at your peril.
Also Read: Best Hacking Tools Of 2017 For Windows, Linux, And OS X
