Back in 2016 a bug was discovered in which it allowed attackers to send a malicious text message to iPhone users in which it could cause their phones to crash. Now it seems that a new malicious link has been discovered that can pretty do much the same thing, where clicking on it will cause Apple’s Messages and/or Safari app to crash.According to AppleInsider’s report, “The website seems to exploit a bug or a non-optimized rendering process for OpenGraph page titles by creating an excessively long tag. When Messages attempts to render a preview of the link, the app then crashes or hangs – and occasionally takes the operating system with it.”
For users who are affected by this, the only way to fix it is to delete the message thread of their conversation in which the link appears in. For those who have longer conversation threads that they’d like to keep, this would no doubt be a bit of a bummer. It also seems that this affects automatic link previews, which means that it isn’t so much about avoiding suspicious links, meaning that users just have to hope that they don’t get sent such messages by friends.
There is no word on whether or not Apple is aware of the issue, which means that we don’t know if and when a fix will be coming.