Need to crash somebody’s iPhone or iPad? Seems it’s not that difficult, when you have a Flipper Zero.
The Flipper Zero, a “Swiss Military knife” software for geeks and penetration testers, can be utilized to bombard units with bogus Bluetooth connection requests, which – in the event that they’re working iOS 17 – can crash them.
One early sufferer was researcher Jeroen van der Ham, who posted on Mastodon about his experiences on a prepare journey, the place he was surrounded by individuals whose units had been “rebooting continuously.”
“Your telephone turns into virtually unusable. You possibly can nonetheless do stuff in between for a few minutes, so it’s actually annoying to expertise,” van der Ham advised Ars Technica. “Whilst a safety researcher who had heard about this assault, it’s actually onerous to appreciate that that’s what’s happening.”
The identical Bluetooth Low Power (BLE) spam message assault could be tried towards Android and Home windows units, though – in contrast to iOS 17 – it doesn’t seem to trigger them to crash.
Proper now, all you are able to do to cease your iPhone or iPad being sufferer of the assault is to disable Bluetooth – one thing, clearly, that many customers can be unwilling to do.
Though Apple pushed out an iOS replace (model 17.1.1) within the final 24 hours which fixes numerous bugs, it seems to be like iPhone and iPad customers must stay affected person in the event that they don’t need to have a Flipper Zero launching a denial-of-service towards their units.
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