Reports Warn Against iPhone-Crash Link

January 26, 2016 at 2:31 pm By

Surfing the web or checking you social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook can come with a pretty annoying result for iPhone users. Some troublesome accounts on social media are using a masked link to “crashsafari.com,” in order to lure users to a site specifically designed to crash iPhones and iPads.

“Crashsafari appears to run javascript code that overloads the victim’s address bar with an infinite series of numbers,” according to Wired.

“But Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, believes that crashsafari.com and an identical site at crashchrome.com actually exploit browsers’ history feature to kill them on command.”

Hypponen, also reported that the hack floods your history with thousands of entries which overloads the browser causing it to crash. It’s not the only thing that crashes as a result. Your device also restarts itself if you have clicked on the link. 

“Crashsafari was created by Matthew Bryant, a 22-year-old working in application security in San Francisco,” according to Wired.

“In my spare time I often test how browsers will handle odd code that gets thrown at them,” said Bryant. 

Bryant said that the sites were created as a joke but a lot of angry users might not see it that way. The report cited that Twitter users have been masking the link and trolling social media posts trying to get people to click on the link.

“Aside from inducing panic in paranoiac iOS users, no harm done,” according to the report.

“Hypponen says victims should rest assured that the bug is only a trivial ‘denial of service’ attack, not a crash that can be used to run commands on their machines.”

This would explain why the site is still functional despite it’s ability to annoy your with the click of a link.

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