Be careful what you text: Tech-sperts are warning iPhone users that typing certain characters into their device will inevitably cause it to crash.
“Do at your own risk,” warned Konstantin, a Mastodon researcher who discovered the bug, in an ominous public service announcement.
The self-proclaimed “hacker” and “web security” researcher specifically found that typing two quotation marks followed by two colons — “”:: — into the Settings App’s search bar will total Springboard, the Apple mobile user interface, Techcrunch reported.
When the digital wizards at PCMag tried this, the screen went black, then lingered with an iPhone loading screen for a few seconds, before relaunching a locked home screen.
This crash will also occur if the user swipes all the way to the right on their home screen and types these characters into the App Library search bar, experts found.
One can think of it like the accidental version of a digital safeword used to deprogram killer AI in a dystopian horror flick.
In fact, experts found that simply typing in the sequence followed by any other character is enough to bring about the app-ocalypse.
Fortunately, this literal code black does not appear to be a “security bug,” according to Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the glitch.
This killer hack is just the latest in a long line of these digital die-roglyphics over the years.
Others have included crash-inducing strings of symbols and Arabic characters in 2015, and an Indian Telugu syllable that caused apps to freeze and shut down in 2018.
The latter bug affected most messaging apps, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Gmail, Outlook for iOS, and Facebook Messenger.
Most recently, in 2020, users could trigger a crash by typing a set of characters written in the Sindhi language combined with the emoji for the Italian flag.
