About a month ago, a security researcher revealed what turned out to be zero-day bug in Apple’s Wi-Fi software, apparently without meaning to:
Carl Schou, founder of an informal hacker collective known as Secret Club, “created originally as a gag between friends who are passionate about technical subjects”, seems to have been doing what bug-hunters do…
…and trying out a range of potentially risky values in the Wi-Fi settings on his iPhone.
Schou set up a Wi-Fi access point with a network name (ESSID) of %p%s%s%s%s%n
, and then deliberately connected his iPhone to it in order to check for what are known as format string vulnerabilities.
This sort of vulnerability is considered somewhat old-school these days, but as we have had good reason to say many times on Naked Security, “never assume anything” in the world of cybersecurity, and it seems that Schou followed this advice, and unexpectedly unearthed up a genuine bug.
Don’t get tricked by this crashtastic iPhone Wi-Fi hack!