Wish to crash somebody’s iPhone or iPad? Seems it’s not that tough, in case you have a Flipper Zero.
The Flipper Zero, a “Swiss Military knife” device for geeks and penetration testers, can be utilized to bombard units with bogus Bluetooth connection requests, which – in the event that they’re operating iOS 17 – can crash them.
One early sufferer was researcher Jeroen van der Ham, who posted on Mastodon about his experiences on a practice journey, the place he was surrounded by individuals whose units have been “rebooting continually.”
“Your cellphone turns into virtually unusable. You may nonetheless do stuff in between for a few minutes, so it’s actually annoying to expertise,” van der Ham informed Ars Technica. “Whilst a safety researcher who had heard about this assault, it’s actually onerous to comprehend that that’s what’s occurring.”
The identical Bluetooth Low Power (BLE) spam message assault could be tried towards Android and Home windows units, though – not like 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 will probably be unwilling to do.
Though Apple pushed out an iOS replace (model 17.1.1) within the final 24 hours which fixes a variety of bugs, it seems 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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