Tech

Connecting to malicious Wi-Fi networks can mess with your iPhone

Close-up photo of Wi-Fi settings on a smartphone.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

There’s a bug in iOS that disables Wi-Fi connectivity when devices join a network that uses a booby-trapped name, a researcher disclosed over the weekend.

By connecting to a Wi-Fi network that uses the SSID “%p%s%s%s%s%n” (quotation marks not included), iPhones and iPads lose the ability to join that network or any other networks going forward, reverse engineer Carl Schou reported on Twitter.

It didn’t take long for trolls to capitalize on the finding:

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