iPhone users: Beware of new text message exploit

Late last night I was browsing Reddit on my iPhone, and I clicked a link to view a photo. An advert on the hosting site immediately exploited a well-known iPhone bug to redirect me to the William Hill betting app in the App Store, a bug that has been annoying iPhone users for years and remains unfixed. I switched back to the browser and closed the page.

Instead of quietly going away, though, either the page or another advert on it had another trick up its sleeve, one that I hadn’t encountered before. This time it opened my messages app, with the recipient and this message already filled in…

Now fortunately you still have to click “send”, so I was able to just hit cancel and no harm done. Annoying, but harmless. Or so I thought. This morning I received a text message from my mum, so I swiped it to reply, and this happened…

Somehow my phone had ended up with this message set as a kind of default reply. Obviously I could just delete that message, but how annoying!

What’s worse is that we can’t really expect this to be fixed any time soon, because Apple simply doesn’t do that. The annoying App Store redirects have been going on for years. And then there’s stuff like this…

Twice a day. Every day. Neither my Mac nor my iPhone can successfully complete the iCloud Keychain “approval” process, so both devices keep nagging me to do it twice every day. Apple tech support say they “understand” why it’s annoying but that’s about all the help they can give.

Let’s just hope the scammers / spammers don’t figure out how to send those text messages without us knowing or being able to stop them. You can bet they’re trying to figure that out right now.