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iPhone bug breaks WiFi when you join hotspot with unusual name:
A new iPhone bug has come to light that breaks your iPhone's wireless functionality by merely connecting to a specific WiFi hotspot.
Once triggered, the bug would render your iPhone unable to establish a WiFi connection, even if it is rebooted or the WiFi hotspot is renamed.
A bug like this could be exploited by malicious actors planting rogue WiFi hotspots in popular areas to bork iPhone devices connecting to them.
[...] "After joining my personal WiFi with the SSID '%p%s%s%s%s%n', my iPhone permanently disabled it's WiFi functionality. Neither rebooting nor changing SSID fixes it :~)," tweeted Schou.
Schou told BleepingComputer that his experiment worked successfully on an iPhone XS, running iOS version 14.4.2.
Tests conducted by BleepingComputer on an iPhone running iOS 14.6 confirm an iPhone's wireless functionality would break after connecting to the strangely named wireless network.
[...] In multiple tests attempting to connect to this strange SSID, our Wi-Fi settings would begin to function erratically, but all led to the same behavior - the breaking of our iPhone's wireless connectivity.
In some tests, connecting to the SSID would fail, but we could no longer access our regular wireless network.
Other tests led to the behavior described by Schou, where the iPhones Wi-Fi setting would be disabled [...]
[...] The only way to fix our iPhone's broken Wi-Fi feature was to reset the device's iPhone network settings, which we describe how to do at the end of the article.
[...] According to users, the issue is unique to iPhones and does not appear to be reproducible on Android devices:
The fix outlined in the article involves resetting all your network settings back to factory defaults. It appears that any previous settings (access points, passwords, etc.) would be lost so it would be best to record them on paper beforehand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @06:13PM (4 children)
<sarcasm>
Oh no... whosoever would do this? Please... no... stop... don't...
</sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 21 2021, @06:40PM
Back in the day, exploiting something like this would be very expensive because it would require a computer which was very expensive. Now it could be done with cheap disposable microcontrollers.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @10:43PM
> malicious actors
Hey, where's the equal time? malicious actresses (and the xx other genders) need some love too!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @11:26PM (1 child)
An excursion to the local mall, with a fully charged laptop, may be coming up...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22 2021, @12:53AM