After fixing the horrifying vulnerabilities named Spectre and Meltdown, a new vulnerability has been discovered that impacts iMessage running on iOS devices only. This flaw will lead to your device not responding and even rebooting in several cases. This was first spotted by Abraham Masri, he said :
? Effective Power is back, baby!
chaiOS bug:
Text the link below, it will freeze the recipient's device, and possibly restart it. https://t.co/Ln93XN51Kq?? Do not use it for bad stuff.
—-
thanks to @aaronp613 @garnerlogan65 @lepidusdev @brensalsa for testing!— Abraham Masri (@cheesecakeufo) January 16, 2018
As noted by Masri, the reason behind this flaw is that the linked contains thousands of metacharacters that iMessage has issues in reading. Hence, when this URL is received by any iOS user, it tries to load the preview and hence causes the crash. And if you find this link on WhatsApp, Viber or other IM applications please do NOT open it. Also, try to block that URL in Safari to keep your device safe.
You are affected by this bug if your device runs iOS 10.0 through 11.2.5 Beta 5 and some macOS computers. Nevertheless, this issue is fixed in iOS 11.2.5 Beta 6 what we await is for the fix to roll out on the stable channel soon.
