Another access point name has been discovered that can disable your iPhone’s ability to use Wi-Fi
Only a couple of weeks after the initial iPhone Wi-Fi bug was found, the same security researcher Carl Schou has found another similar issue.
Schou tweeted today that if an iPhone comes in range of a Wi-Fi network named ‘%secretclub%power’, then that iPhone will no longer be able to use Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi related features. Schuo even says that this bug persists when resetting network settings.
It seems the only workaround for this particular issue would be a hard factory reset of the device. 9to5Mac did not independently test this, nor do we recommend others try.
The earlier issue relied on the iPhone encountering a network name with the SSiD “%p%s%s%s%s%n” and the user attempting to connect to it. However, that bug was fixable by resetting iPhone network settings in the Settings app. This new problem appears more severe as it can trigger as soon as the iPhone comes in range of a malicious public Wi-Fi hotspot using that poisoned name.
Clearly, the underlying bugs are related as both ‘%secretclub%power’ and ‘%p%s%s%s%s%n’ exploit a string format coding error somewhere in the underlying iOS networking stack.
