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Bug IOS Iphone Media Operating Systems Software Youtube Apple Build Hardware Technology

Malicious Video Link Can Cause Any iOS Device To Freeze (9to5mac.com) 53

A new bug in iOS has surfaced that will cause any iOS device to freeze when trying to view a certain .mp4 video in Safari. YouTube channel EverythingApplePro explains the bug in a video titled "This Video Will CRASH ANY iPhone!" 9to5Mac reports: As you'll see in the video below from EverythingApplePro, viewing a certain video in Safari will cause iOS to essentially overload and gradually become unusable. We won't link the infectious video here for obvious reasons, but you can take our word for it when we say that it really does render your device unusable. It's not apparently clear as to why this happens. The likely reason is that it's simply a corrupted video that's some sort of memory leak and when played, iOS isn't sure how to properly handle it, but there's like more to it than that. 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 done 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.
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Malicious Video Link Can Cause Any iOS Device To Freeze

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  • or just load IOS 10... my iPhone 5S freezes all the time now.

  • link to video (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @08:41PM (#53343591)

    this is the link to the video [vk.com] that will crash apple products. Share with all your iFiends. ;)

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't get it, it doesn't seem to do anyth

      Sent from my iPhone
  • it's simply a corrupted video that's some sort of memory leak

    Maybe is the browser/player/library to have a memory leak triggered and exploited by means of a specially crafted video file!
    ah!

  • Why doesn't this affect all types of computers? Why doesn't it affect Android, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux? Why *just* IOS? That doesn't make sense, there must be something unique about IOS where it doesn't handle video as well as other OS's....

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Why doesn't this affect all types of computers? Why doesn't it affect Android, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux? Why *just* IOS? That doesn't make sense, there must be something unique about IOS where it doesn't handle video as well as other OS's....

      Easy, it's a standard, so there are many implementations of it. It's why the Stagefright bugs don't affect iOS - you're trying to test against a different implementation that has a different way of doing things.

      And maybe it does affect Android, but the way Stagefright

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

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