How to turn off someone else's iPhone via SMS

A new vulnerability in Apple's operating system was discovered yesterday by Reddit users . A line composed of certain Unicode characters, sent as an SMS to any Apple device, causes the operating system to crash.

The function responsible for displaying Arabic text does not correctly handle the situation with the display of a received message on the lock screen. It shows only part of the message, and replaces the remaining text with an ellipsis. If the ellipsis falls between two characters not from the Latin alphabet, the application crashes so much that it drags the entire OS.

While experienced users have found a solution for how to remove the ill-fated message, when viewing which there is a problem - you need to send any picture in response to it, and then delete the dialogue via iMessage. Also, disabling notification of incoming messages will save you from trouble.

Not surprisingly, an error inside one of the main functions of the OS affects the correct operation of other devices of the company. For example, although the Apple Watch is able to receive an uncomfortable message, when you try to answer it through a voice recognition system, the Watch operating system also drops.

Other users report that the message does not digest the iPad, and even Mac OS, where an inconvenient message disrupts the Terminal application.

“Errors in decoding and rendering Unicode characters will still lead to various errors like this,” said Ken Simpson , director of MailChannels, a spam filtering and e-mail security company. “So far, nothing is known about the exploits of this vulnerability, but their development is quite possible, and this could threaten the security of users of all devices from Apple.”

Apple itself said that they are already aware of the error and are working on the release of the necessary patches.

Similar errors occur periodically. In 2013, a sequence of Arabic characters again led to the crash of any application using the WebKit engine on iOS and Mac OS.