People are trolling iPhone users with the ‘killer symbol’ that crashes their apps

Surprise! Assorted jerks on the internet have weaponized the Unicode-based bug we reported yesterday to insta-crash apps running on an iPhone or a Mac. The result is somewhere between the old Alt + F4 trick and a script kiddie stunt, and it ranges from being annoying to rendering a device unusable, depending on the tenacity of the troll.

The bug causes many iOS and Mac apps to crash when rendering two characters in Telugu, a south Indian language. While anyone can avoid viewing the symbols themselves, problems arise when someone ill-intentioned starts spamming out the symbols or sending them directly to devices where they will be received as a notification.

Droves of Twitter users have taken to tweeting the symbols out over the last day with messages like “read this to log off instantly” and “retweet this to crash anyone using an Apple device,” though luckily most of them don’t have many followers. Still, if the symbol shows up in your @ replies or in the handle of someone who likes one of your tweets, then it’s game over for whatever app you have open (Motherboard writer Joseph Cox learned this the hard way). From what we’ve observed, the only way to get an app working again is to reinstall it from scratch — a time-consuming process, especially if a troll just crashes it all over again.

As captured on Twitter, one security researcher added one of the symbols to his Uber handle as an experiment. “I suspect a crashed phone means you get routed to the next driver… who gets crashed too. Like an Uber routing worm,” he wrote. We reached out to Uber to see if they’re aware of the issue and will update when we hear back.

For now, most of the trolling seems to be on Twitter. A search on both Facebook and Reddit yielded conspicuously few signs of Telugu trolling, so it appears that those platforms may have taken steps to limit the fallout from the iPhone-killing Unicode symbols.

Meanwhile, a thorough blog post by Mozilla engineer Manish Goregaokar suggests that the scope of the Unicode bug could be broader than the two symbols we know. “… From some experimentation, this bug seemed to occur for any pair of Telugu consonants with a vowel, as long as the vowel is not ై (ai),” he wrote. His findings so far:

So, ultimately, the full set of cases that cause the crash are:

Any sequence <consonant1, virama, consonant2, ZWNJ, vowel> in Devanagari, Bengali, and Telugu, where:

consonant2 is suffix-joining – i.e. र, র, য, and all Telugu consonants
If consonant2 is र or র, consonant1 is not the same letter (or a variant, like ৰ)
vowel is not ై or ৌ

TechCrunch has reached out to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to see how those platforms are handling the bug, which is particularly destructive when blasted out on an open social network. We’ve also been in touch with Apple and they’ve confirmed that there is a “dot update” fix coming soon, though declined to confirm if it would be iOS 11.2.6. Apple noted that the bug is fixed in current betas of iOS, tvOS, macOS and watchOS.

Comments

Google Announces Android Wear Update With WiFi Support, Always-On Apps, And More

It has been a while since Android Wear got any substantial updates, but today Google is announcing a big one. A new version of Wear will be rolling out over the coming weeks that includes a number of previously rumored features (like WiFi support) and some all new stuff (like always-on apps). Most Wear devices use the always-on ambient mode for the watch face by default, the Moto 360 being a notable exception. The new Android Wear version allows apps to operate in ambient mode too, so they remain active when the watch goes to sleep. That makes it easier to take a quick glance at the app instead of waking the device up and opening the app all over again. The watch will still only go into full-color mode when necessary. WiFi support is also coming in the update, which means your watch can be useful even if your phone isn't connected. Watches with WiFi support will be able to connect to WiFi and still get messages and notifications from your phone, provided it has an interne...

Budding #entrepreneur from Chandigarh University!!

Budding #entrepreneur from Chandigarh University!! #CU #students unfolded their creative ideas and presented them with a productive shape! Meet Our #Automobile #Engineering student - Trilok Singh, who has started his own start-up with the name GEARR TECHNOLOGIES under the guidance of CU-TBI. This start up focuses on affordable high end #Bicycles and its high #technology equipment’s. This start- up will bring to the Indian audience the scope of Products, #innovation, creativity and customization available in the market. Watch the video!!

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

The Eight Most Impactful Excel Shortcuts That You Should Master

If you’ve ever gone online to research improving your Excel skills, you’ve undoubtedly come across a post or two listing all of Excel’s keyboard shortcuts. In the latest version of Excel, Microsoft has made it easier than ever to learn shortcuts, by assigning shortcuts to nearly every function and making the discovery of the input sequence very transparent. While memorizing Excel shortcuts will generally improve your productivity, not all shortcuts are created equal. Shortcuts that you never use are not inherently not very useful and not worth memorizing. Your focus should be on the shortcuts that have the most impact – either by the amount of time it saves you, the frequency that you’ll use them, or the behavior it encourages. If you’ve already started using Excel or just haven’t utilized shortcuts heavily before, review the top eight shortcuts below. For any that you don’t know already, I would suggest memorizing them and incorp...

Facebook will verify the location of U.S. election ad buyers by mailing them postcards

Facebook’s global director of policy programs says it will start sending postcards by snail mail to verify buyers of ads related to United States elections. Katie Harbath, who described the plan at a conference held by the National Association of Secretaries of State this weekend, didn’t reveal when the program will start, but told Reuters that it would be before the Congressional midterm elections in November. The cards will be sent to people who want to purchase ads that mention candidates running for federal offices, but not issue-based political ads, Harbath said, and contain a code that buyers need to enter to verify that they are in the U.S. The program is similar to ones used by Google My Business and Nextdoor when they need to verify business owners or users who want to join closed neighborhood groups, respectively. Harbath told Reuters that the postcards “won’t solve everything,” but were the most effective method the company came up with to prevent people from using fa...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog