Where would we be without spell check and autocorrect? There’d be a lot of instances of “accomodate” and “absense,” and more mixups of “affect” and “effect” than we care to imagine. But when it comes to mis-typing on your phone, a gaff could be more than just embarrassing: It could potentially cause the phone to malfunction. As TechCrunch first reported, a security researcher recently discovered that typing four simple characters on your iPhone or iPad can cause your device to briefly crash.
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On Aug. 21, a web security expert known as Konstantin posted on the social networking site Mastodon that typing “”:: (two quotation marks and two colons) would cause SpringBoard, Apple’s built-in home screen manager, to crash. TechCrunch then verified that this does, in fact, happen when the characters are typed into the search bar on the home screen, the search bar in the Settings app, or the App Library search bar, which is accessed via swiping left on the home screen.
“Triggering the bug briefly crashes Springboard, then reloads to your lock screen. In other tests, the bug flashed the screen black for a second,” TechCrunch wrote.
Commenters on Konstantin’s post clarified that typing “”: plus any other character also triggered the same crashing response.
However, two iOS security researchers told TechCrunch that the software bug is not a security issue as it does not appear that it can be deployed other than the device owner typing the characters in.
This is welcome news since, as CNET reports, so-called “text bombs” hit iPhones in 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2020. In these cases, viewing texts containing certain characters would cause iPhones and iOS devices to freeze and require a hard reset to get back to normal.
Similarly, TechCrunch references a 2020 Twitter bug that crashed the Twitter app of anyone who viewed a Tweet with specific characters.
And, more recently, in April, there was a “sophisticated” push-bombing attack in which hackers were prompting iPhone users to reset their Apple ID password via unsolicited pop-up notifications. As Best Life reported at the time, “the goal [was] to infiltrate users with as many notifications as possible before they give in and click ‘Allow.'” The hackers then called users, asking them to verify a one-time code that allowed them to take over and wipe out the phone.
At the time of writing, Apple had not responded to news outlets’ requests for comment on the latest bug, but in past cases, these types of issues were fixed with iOS updates.