Back in January this year, a Safari hack was causing Apple devices to reboot. Called CrashSafari, the code included a header title and a JavaScript which calls the HTML5 History API thousands of times in a loop, essentially causing Safari to freeze. This has been seem to affect the iOS 9.2.1 and OS X 10.11 but it would seem as though this got fixed with the release of the iOS 10 as we haven’t heard much about CrashSafari since then.
This time though, 9to5 Mac reports that a certain .mp4 video played in Safari for iOS will overload iOS thereby making it unusable.
In the attached video, it doesn’t say the video is particularly linked to any malicious source but all we know is that it renders your iPhone almost useless for sometime
Because of the nature of the flaw, it isn’t specific to a certain iOS build. As you can see in the video below,\ playing the video on an iPhone running as far back as iOS 5 will cause the device to freeze and become unusable.
Interestingly, with iOS 10.2 beta 3, if you let an iPhone affected by the bug sit there for long enough, it will power off and indefinitely display the spinning wheel that you normally see during the shutdown process.
If someone sends you the malicious link and you fall for it, this is luckily a pretty easy problem to fix. All you have to do is hard reboot your device. For any iPhone but the iPhone 7, this can be down by long-pressing the power and Home buttons at the same time. The iPhone 7, of course, uses a new non-mechanical Home button. In order to reboot an iPhone 7, you must long-press the power button and volume down button at the same time.
A fix is expected from Apple soon but there’s no cause for alarm as this doesn’t appear to steal data from your device. It just makes life temporarily unpleasant.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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