Android might be targeted by hackers and malware far more often than Apple’s iOS platform, but that doesn’t mean devices like the iPhone and iPad are immune to threats. A post on Russian website Habrahabr.ru draws attention to a fairly serious vulnerability that allows nefarious users to remotely crash apps on iOS 6, or even render them unusable. The vulnerability is seemingly due to a bug in Apple’s CoreText font rendering framework, and OS X Mountain Lion is affected as well.
According to the report, simply exposing various iOS or OS X apps to one of several possible strings of text is enough to trigger a crash. What’s more, sending one such string as an SMS or an iMessage to an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac computer can crash Apple’s Messages app repeatedly, rendering it unusable.
Safari is also impacting by the bug, and naming a Wi-Fi network with one of the strings of text can cause an error while an Apple device is scanning for networks.
The report claims that Apple has been aware of this vulnerability for six months and has yet to patch the exploit in any currently available operating system build. The author does note, however, that beta versions of iOS 7 and of OS X Mavericks are seemingly not affected by the bug.
