This single-character message can crash your iPhone

There's a new iOS bug in town, and -- like so many times before -- it appears to be fairly easy to exploit.

Italian blog MobileWorld first reported its existence, and The Verge noticed and tested the bug, which consists of partially or fully crashing an iPhone just by sending a message.

The message in question has to contain a single character from the Indian Telugu language (not included here for obvious reasons). When the message is opened on an iPhone running iOS 11.2.5, the iPhone's native Messages app and certain third-party app including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger will crash. In some cases, the iPhone will simply revert to its login screen and require you to enter your PIN again.

Apparently the only way to fix it is to delete the message thread, which you'll presumably have to do from a Mac app or desktop web browser, depending on the service. If that's not available to you, you might be able to delete the thread when you receive a new message on it.

This is the latest in the fairly long line of many similar bugs which allow attackers to crash an iOS device by sending a simple text message. Last month, a bug dubbed ChaiOS let attackers freeze/crash iPhones by sending a text message containing a specific link; Apple fixed that one within a week. And last year a bug was discovered that crashes an iPhone with a message containing a combination of emoji.

We tested the bug with Messages on an iPhone 8 running iOS 11.2.5. Once we found the right character, the phone crashed within seconds of receiving the message -- even without tapping the notification or launching Messages. The phone momentarily went black, then kicked us to the passcode login screen (fingerprints still worked, so it obviously wasn't a full reboot). After logging in via fingerprint, the phone worked, but Messages did not. It wouldn't open, even after we did a full reboot and deleted the conversation thread via a Mac.

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We've contacted Apple regarding this issue and will update this article when we hear from them.

Update 2/15/2018: We initially couldn't reproduce the bug, but after this story first published, we found the right character and were able to verify that the bug exists.

UPDATE: Feb. 15, 2018, 5:48 p.m. EST: Apple has told Mashable that the bug is present only in the current versions of its operating systems: iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, watchOS 4, and tvOS 11 and a fix will arrive in an upcoming version, coming this spring. The bug is already fixed in the latest betas of these operating systems.