New iPhone WiFi Bug Can Only Be Fixed With A Factory Reset

Back in June, security researcher Carl Schou discovered a WiFi bug in iOS that when an iPhone connects to the network that uses a particular string of characters, it would disable the phone’s WiFi. Thankfully, this was more annoying than damaging and a reset of the iPhone’s network settings fixed the issue.

However, according to a new update from Schou, it seems that a newer version of the bug has been uncovered. Using a new set of characters, it seems that this bug is worse than the previous one because upon connecting to this, it will permanently disable the WiFi on the iPhone and that resetting the network settings might not be enough.

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You can permanently disable any iOS device's WiFI by hosting a public WiFi named %secretclub%power
Resetting network settings is not guaranteed to restore functionality.#infosec #0day

— vmcall (@vm_call) July 4, 2021

This means that if you ever have the misfortune of connecting to this particular network, you might need to factory reset your iPhone to get its WiFi back up and running again. According to Schou, this new network name is called “%secretclub%power” so if you do come across, do not, we repeat, do not connect to it lest you find yourself being forced to reset your iPhone back to its factory settings.

So far apart from being very annoying, it doesn’t seem like this could cause more serious problems, but either way it’s an issue that Apple will hopefully address in a future iOS update.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iOS, iPhone, Social Hit