iPhone Wi-Fi Crushed by Weird Network

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FUD is spreading about a weirdly named personal network that a reverse engineer stumbled across and which he said “permanently” wrecked his iPhone’s Wi-Fi.
 
TL;DR version: The twitching inflicted on his iPhone, which he demonstrated in the 4-second Tweet below, wasn’t permanent. As replies to the initial post pointed out, an iPhone’s Wi-Fi can be restored by resetting network settings (Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings).
 
It’s a painful action to take, given that it will wipe out all of a device’s Wi-Fi passwords, but it’s a lot better than the prospect of an iPhone’s Wi-Fi having been “permanently” barbecued.

Having said that, the glitch is triggered by a string format bug that will inspire threat actors to dig “deeper into the inner workings of Apple’s Wi-Fi stack” to find out “what, exactly, causes the behavior and how to exploit it,” predicted security expert Dirk Schrader, global vice president at New Net Technologies.
 
On Friday, the reverse engineer, Carl Schou, said that hsi clip shows his iPhone Wi-Fi stuttering – trying to connect, then disabling the device’s Wi-Fi – when he joined his personal Wi-Fi network, named with the SSID “%p%s%s%s%s%n”. “My iPhone permanently disabled it’s [sic] WiFi functionality,” Schou wrote. “Neither rebooting nor changing SSID fixes it :~)”

Read more: iPhone Wi-Fi Crushed by Weird Network | Threatpost