Skip to content

Technology and money in plain English · Since 2012

Apple
News

Newly discovered vulnerability crashes apps in iOS, also found in OS X

We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It doesn't change what we recommend.

sad_mac_retroThere’s one thing that Apple prides itself of is the fact that it is able to provide top notch security for its users.  Whether its on the iOS mobile platform, or on the desktop OS X platform, the company does its best to make sure all users are protected.  But according to a new report, even Apple isn’t able to get away form vulnerabilities.  Android may be the mainstream target, but Apple gets caught in the net every so often as well.

According to a new report from Habrahabr.ru, a major vulnerability has been discovered in iOS, and also takes affect in the OS X platform as well.  The vulnerability directly allows remote users to crash apps in iOS 6, currently also effects Mountain Lion.  The vulnerability works through a bug in Apple’s CoreText font rendering framework.

To crash apps, or even render them completely useless, all the remote hacker would have to do is to expose the apps to one of several possible strings of text, and the apps would simply crash.  Safari is also affected by this issue as well where naming a Wi-Fi network with one of the strings of text can cause an error while an Apple device is scanning for networks.

In the report, it states that Apple is aware of this bug, rather has been aware of this for six months, but has done little to fix it.  In the newer software, however, this bug does not take affect on iOS 7 betas and OS X Mavericks.  So it’s best to upgrade your system as soon as possible, or perhaps you can wait for a fix to be officially issued by Apple.

See something that needs fixing? Report an error

Get The Jolt Journal in your inbox

The day’s top stories in tech, finance and AI, picked by our editors. Free.

Choose your newsletters

Up next

Keep reading

Add The Jolt Journal as a preferred source on Google

Add The Jolt Journal to your Home Screen to get alerts

Most Popular

More in Apple

See all

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Breaking-news alerts

We’ll send a notification to this device when a big story breaks. Choose what you want, then allow notifications when your browser asks. You can change this or turn alerts off any time.

Send me