Like a fainting goat who freezes at the first sign of a farmer, an iPhone running iOS 10 can be bricked by sending just a few emojis in the Messages app.
That's according to YouTube prankster EverythingApplePro, who uploaded a video yesterday describing how a seemingly random collection of text messages can cause Apple's flagship smartphone to crash and reboot. The text string is composed of a waving white flag emoji, a zero, a rainbow, and a variation selector, which is a hidden Unicode character that can be copied into an iMessage.
Send all four of these at once, and the recipient's device will seize up and eventually restart. There's also an alternate method that involves creating a new contact file that contains the text string and sharing the file to another phone. That contact card will crash a phone running any iOS 10 version, although the iMessage string only bricks phones with iOS 10.1 or below, the Guardian reported.
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After the YouTube video surfaced this week, another blogger posting under the name "Vincedes3" claimed to have discovered the flaw last month, and offered more details on how it works in a blog post. The iOS Messages app tries to combine the text string into a single rainbow flag emoji, but the process consumes too much data, causing a crash, according to the post.
Vincedes3, who describes him or herself as a French security researcher, said that the bug had been patched in a beta version of iOS 10. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Longtime iPhone owners may have cursed emoji pranks before, since iOS's inability to parse certain Unicode strings is nothing new. It last appeared in 2015, when Apple said it was aware of the problem and would issue a fix.
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