Security News > 2020 > April > iPhone “word of death” could crash your phone – what you need to know
A weird combination of Unicode characters that make up a nonsense word can crash your iPhone, apparently by confusing the iOS operating system when it tries to figure out how to display the "Word".
We don't know how to read Arabic writing, or indeed the text of any Semitic language, but we do know that the writing systems of these languages generally differ from most European languages.
Semitic languages are usually written from right-to-left, and they often don't bother writing vowels, assuming that the reader can supply the missing sounds from experience, in much the same way that we know instinctively what is meant when we see English pseudo-words such as RSPCT, XCLLNT and NKD SCRTY. Of course, there are some words that even a well-read student of Arabic might not be sure how to say aloud, such as the names of foreign people and places, or phrases for which correct pronuniciation is considered important, such as names and words of religious significance, or words that are confusingly ambiguous without some extra help.
"As far as we can tell the dubious"Word" in the current iPhone "message-of-death - shown recently on Twitter in a video by popular Apple fan EverthingApplePro - is constructed by taking a simple word that no-one would have trouble with.
In making sense of a ludicrously bad encoding of the word bad, it seems that Apple apps that try to print it on screen get locked up in a processing loop that eventually makes the phone dysfunctional for a while.