If you have been following the news, you might have heard of a bug affecting the Messages app on iOS. Basically when a user receives a particular message containing a set of characters, it will cause the app to crash and reboot the device instantly without any warning. It seems more annoying than malicious but it’s still something that needs fixing all the same.
Now recently Apple has come forward and acknowledged the bug and stated that a fix will be released in due time, but in the meantime the Cupertino company has posted an official workaround on its support website which users can refer to if they were to receive such a message on their iOS device.
For those who have received such a message, the first thing to do is not open it as opening it is what will trigger all the nasty stuff that follows. Instead Apple has advised users to first ask Siri to “read unread messages”. The next step involves asking Siri to reply to the malicious message. Once that’s done, you should be able to launch the Messages app with no problem.
From there you could choose to leave it since it has been rendered harmless, but Apple has advised that you delete the entire thread. However if this is a thread with a friend and you’d rather keep the chat history, you can tap and hold the malicious message, tap “More”, and delete it from the thread.