Security News > 2021 > June > iPhone Wi-Fi Crushed by Weird Network
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.
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.
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".
BleepingComputer confirmed the bug by repeatedly trying to connect to a network with that strangely named SSID: The news outlet reported that in doing so, it encountered the same Wi-Fi malfunction as Schou found.
One respondent to Schou's post claimed that they're in the habit of inserting the "%x" format specifiers in their Wi-Fi SSID to avoid causing "Too much havoc" for unsuspecting Wi-Fi users who might try to connect.