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iPhone Wi-Fi Bug Renders iPhone Unable to Connect

By Laura Tucker
Iphone Wi Fi Bug Featured

Living in this technology age, many of us have a fear of not being able to connect – not being able to reach people, keep up with social media, stream media, finish a deadline on time, etc. A new iPhone Wi-Fi bug has been discovered that makes any iPhone it comes near unable to connect to Wi-Fi. This new bug seems worse than a similar bug that was just discovered a few weeks ago.

New iPhone Wi-Fi Bug Discovered

Security researcher Carl Schou discovered the new iPhone Wi-Fi bug and reported it on Twitter.

He wrote on July 4, “You can permanently disable any iOS device’s Wi-Fi by hosting a public Wi-Fi named ‘secretclub%power.’ Resetting network settings is not guaranteed to restore functionality #infosec #0day.”

Iphone Wi Fi Bug Control Center

Schou came back later in the day and responded to his own tweet to say, “Seriously, I still don’t have Wi-Fi.”

While it seems a hard factory reset may fix the iPhone Wi-Fi bug, no one has come forward yet to say they tried it and that it worked. It seems to be such a dangerous issue that no one wants to attempt getting the bug to try the reset as a possible solution.

Connection to Earlier iPhone Wi-Fi Bug

On June 18, Schou reported a similar bug. He tweeted, “After joining any personal Wi-Fi with the SSID ‘%p%s%s%s%s%n,’ my iPhone permanently disabled it’s [sic] Wi-Fi functionality. Neither rebooting nor changing SSID fixes it. :~)”

A major difference between the two iPhone Wi-Fi bugs is that the earlier one is fixable by resetting the network settings. Another major difference is that the earlier bug relied on a user attempting to connect to the faulty network. The new bug, however, can be triggered by an iPhone simply coming within a certain range of a public Wi-Fi hotspot using that name.

Iphone Wi Fi Bug Phonee

It’s assumed that the two iPhone Wi-Fi bugs are connected because they both make use of a coding error within iOS. To avoid these two bugs and perhaps others of their ilk, you can avoid using networks that start with “%s,” “%p,” and “%n.”

You can be safer by avoiding networks that use percent signs in the title. To be even safer, avoid all unknown networks until a security update is released that will fix it.

If you’re having issues with other bugs or other ills, learn how to find and remove viruses. Also learn how to fatory reset your iPhone in case it’s ever needed.

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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