Urgent warning: Don’t type these characters or your iPhone will crash

A web security researcher has issued a warning about a newly discovered bug that causes Apple iPhones and iPads to crash.

Typing these four characters: “”:: (two double quotation marks and two colons) into the App library, accessed by swiping left several times or the search bar in the Settings app, causes devices to crash and then reload the lock screen.

In some cases the screen flashes black before the lock screen appears. 

That is because typing the characters triggers a bug in the latest version of the iOS 17 and beta iOS 18, due to an issue in how the software interprets the series of punctuation marks. 

‘On your iPhone, swipe left past all your Home Screen pages to get to App Library. Then search for ‘::,’ security researcher Konstantin (@kwpn) wrote on social networking site Mastadon.

‘Do at your own risk,’ he added.

So far, it appears that the only way to trigger the bug is to manually type these characters into your device.

It’s highly unlikely that a third party could trigger this bug, which means it’s probably not a security risk, experts told TechCrunch.

‘It’s not a security bug,’ said Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug. Patrick Wardle, another iOS security researcher, agreed.

It also doesn’t appear to cause any damage to devices, but the bug could be an annoyance if you accidentally type these characters into your iPhone.

These four random characters cause your phone to crash due to a flaw in how iOS handles certain Unicode characters, according to Apple Magazine. 

Unicode characters are an international character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to each character across languages and scripts. 

The software misinterprets these characters and triggers a crash.

Rumor has it that Apple is preparing a minor update ahead of its iOS 18 rollout this September.

The update, iOS 17.6.2, will likely provide bug fixes, security patches and enhancements to users.

So, there’s a chance that iOS 17.6.2 could squash this new bug. 

This isn’t the first time that a specific combination of characters has triggered bugs on Apple devices. 

‘Text bombs’ – malicious messages that contain characters that can affect the operation of an app or device – have plagued iPhone users for years. 

For example, the 2018 text bomb contained Unicode characters from the Indian language Telugu that caused Apple devices to crash. But the bug was later fixed. 

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.