Pierluigi Paganini
January 26, 2016
Do not open any a link to crashsafari.com on your iPhone, iPad or even Macs, visiting the website will cause the Safari application to crash and Apple device to restart.
Obviously, Apple users are spreading the link to CrashSafari.com via their social media accounts, to masquerade the attack it possible to use a URL shortener so the victim is will never know that they are visiting the malicious link.
The trick works on the latest versions of Apple operating systems, iOS 9.2.1, OS X 10.11.3. When the device restarts the phone will have no consequence, the unique risk for the user is to lose all the open tabs.
Why does Safari Crash?
The website crashsafari.com generates a long and an increasing string of characters that overload the string in the address bar of the Apple Safari browser.
Analyzing the code it is possible to verify that CrashSafari code includes:
Are you an Android user? Do not laugh because you are equally vulnerable.
The Chrome browser running on Android devices heat up and become sluggish while visiting this website. The desktop and laptops are affected too, but in a minor way because the impact depends on the processing power of the system. Visiting crashsafari.com will cause Safari on a Mac to crash too.
Chrome also becomes not responding visiting the website.
Apparently more than 150,000 people have fallen victim to just one abbreviated link alone. Apple has yet to comment on the issue.
(Security Affairs – crashsafari.com, Apple)
