iPhone Wi-Fi Breaks Abruptly

A wireless network naming convention bug has been discovered in Apple’s iOS operating system that effectively disables an iPhone’s ability to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

The issue was found that the phone’s Wi-Fi functionality gets permanently disabled after joining a Wi-Fi network with the unusual name “%p%s%s%s%s%n” even after rebooting the phone or changing the network’s SSID

The bug could have serious implications in that bad actors could exploit the issue to plant fraudulent Wi-Fi hotspots with the name in question to break the device’s wireless networking features.The issue stems from a string formatting bug in the manner iOS parses the SSID input, triggering a denial of service in the process.

While the issue isn’t reproducible on Android devices, iPhones that have been affected by the problem would need to have their iOS network settings reset by going to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings and confirm the action.