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iPhone hacked or virus! Text messages gone and phone freezing!

CALL APPLE SUPPORT ASAP IF YOU HAVE THIS ISSUE!!!! They don't respond to these discussions!

(800) MY-IPHONE (800-694-7466)


My wife and I woke up this morning with a text message on both our iPhone 5 and 4s (running on Sprint) for $10 for Microsoft Office. We did not click on the text, but our text message app crashed. Then our texts disappeared and reappeared after rebooting, and we deleted the suspicious text but could not access any of our other texts.


It has been hours later and we can't text and our messages are there and then gone, our phone keeps on freezing on other apps, and my iPhone 5 screen is flickering. We both received another $10 Microsoft Office text and were able to delete it again.


We have rebooted, turned off, let the phone rest 30 minutes off, etc. and our phones are still worthless. They appear to work for a while and then start acting up again.


I called Apple (800) MY-IPHONE (800-694-7466) and spoke to a senior customer assistant, Brittney, who said I was the only person reporting this problem. I told her there were threads here with the exact same issues and she told me they don't respond to problems reported here since it is just a discussion board and only do something if you call them. She suggested for me to do a full restore to factory setting on my phone but showed no real concern why this happened to our phones...


Our phones either have been hacked or have a virus and this is a huge issue! If you have this problem, please call Apple ASAP.

iPhone 5

Posted on Jul 29, 2013 8:51 AM

Reply
39 replies

Jul 29, 2013 8:59 AM in response to KiltedTim

Virus contamination of a non-jailbroken iPhone hasn't been documented yet- that doesn't guarantee impossibility.


A single text message should not result in a crashing of the Messaging app, nor freezing of the entire phone, nor automatic shutdown as it's resulted in at least seven people within the forum today. Identifying the problem as "text-message spam" is an over-simplification.

Jul 29, 2013 9:03 AM in response to KiltedTim

Our phones have never been jail-broken or modified in any way. Yet a text message we did not even open has made our phones non-functional. Someone has illegally accessed our phone via a unread text so isn't that a virus/malware/hack? The iPhones apparently have a vulnerability which is very serious and newsworthy. That means no iPhone user is safe.

Jul 29, 2013 9:19 AM in response to breckenridge4daze

breckenridge4daze wrote:


Virus contamination of a non-jailbroken iPhone hasn't been documented yet- that doesn't guarantee impossibility.

No, it doesn't. But it's highly unlikely that is what happened.


A single text message should not result in a crashing of the Messaging app, nor freezing of the entire phone, nor automatic shutdown as it's resulted in at least seven people within the forum today.

There are/were several documented bugs that could cause EXACTLY that behavior when receiving a malformed text message.


Note that none of this constitutes "infection" of the phone, or "hacking" as in unauthorized accessing of information by a third party.

Jul 29, 2013 9:48 AM in response to PappyDoc

This issue could potentialy be a phishing text causing this issue this DOES NOT happen only to jailbroken phones. If it were me I would restore my phone and load a backup from before the first text via iCloud or iTunes. If you don't have one of these backups I would recommend transferring all data of importance (family photos and contacts that could not otherwise be obtained) to iTunes so that they don't get lost. Hope this helps.

Jul 29, 2013 10:24 AM in response to KiltedTim

If there is an existing bug within the Message app that results in a memory leak, then there is, best case scenario, a horrendous vulnerability within the platform. ie: If an individual can manufacture a malformed text message that causes memory mismanagement, there is a near-fatal flaw within the program.


Either way, this deserves the attention of the Apple Development team.

iPhone hacked or virus! Text messages gone and phone freezing!

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