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

Since the OP doesn't bother telling us what version of iOS they are running, we have no way of knowing whether they could be suffering from this problem or not. It has been corrected in the current version of iOS.

I got the same text this morning. I did not open the text, but my phone was inoperable for about 30 minutes. As soon as I was able to open my Text app, I swiped the spam text to delete it. Once it was deleted, my phone went back to normal again.

So basically an unopened spam text totally crapped out my phone. w.t.f.???!

fyi - my iPhone 4s is up to date on iOS 6.1.3, not jail broken, and I'm on Sprint.

I'm running 6.1.3 on iPhone 4. Sprint seems to be a common denominator.

I have iOS 6.1.3

Obviously, the current OS has not corrected the problem! Apple Tech Support is acting clueless . . .they just say reset and restore phone . . . .duhhhhh . . that could be the answer to every tech question.

i was having this same issue and I just fixed it fully. I got a text msg some time this morning and when i tried to open the message app didnt work. I kept getting a blank a screen. After playing with the phone for a few good hours i was able to fix it. I'm not sure if you need to reset the phone becuase i did that before doing what actually fixed the issue but i would suggest to reset it on top of the follwoing:

1- Go to Setting > Message

2- Turn Off all the options.

3- Stop the app from running: By clicking twice on the home botton and closing the app from there.

4- Reboot the phone

5- run the Message App

6- click edit and delete the message

7- Close and stop the app again

8- reboot phone.. and it will work just fine again.

My suggestion is at this point reset the phone just incase to be sure that is clean.

In my opinion, it is not a virus and it is not hacking anything. the text message it comes from an email form, and the app doesnt understand HTML formatting.

I'm attaching few screen shot to help understand the situation

Blank Screen:

Message to delete is the second one:

This is a seemingly appropriate temporary fix; but the larger issue is that the Message app should not respond to malformed XML/text message by crashing. This is a clear unhandled exception, and if all it takes for the app to crash is a syntactical error within the text message payload the results are easily repeatable/exploitable by malicious code.

in my opinion, the phone gets affected bc you have the alerts, so the alert was trying to read a portion of the message which is been executed by your phone. So your phone was trying to do the same thing that you and everyone else was trying to do - to run the app. So you are taking memory, processing time to attend to run the app with no luck. So that is why I decided to turn off everything before executing the app.

the aamg37 procedure did not work, I have been on phone with Apple for one hour, they know this is serious, and are working with sprint to lock down the problem,

they are only saying a factory reset will work, and YOU CANNOT restore from your back up because you are just putting the virus back on the phone. The only other option is replace the phone throught Apple Care or new phone from sprint

aamg37- that's a good interpretation, the behavior was reminscent of apps with memory/processing problems.

I attempted to report the bug through the Apple Developer Bug Reporter, but the site is currently down as Apple continues repairs on the Developer site having been recently hacked. I emailed devbugs@apple.com about the problem, but, who knows how often that gets checked.

i fixed 3 phones, just double check all the steps. Just make sure not to open the text and go edit and delete it. you may have missed one of the steps. And yes, the restore didnt work for me.

Yes that is what phishing is however with an attachment it can turn into other problems in addition the steps I recomended will still fix this issue if its anything other than a virus.

It seems that you are right, the common denominator here is Sprint. I would surmise that these are not SMS text messages but are cell carrier messages and Sprints system has been hacked. This occurs ocassionally and you should contact Sprint and inform them of the time of the message as closely as possible.

A message of this sort that is corrupted could indeed freeze a smartphone for a period and would not be possible to delete. I have yet to see anyone with a different carrier reporting thes. I have not checked Sprints website to see if they have posted something on it.