Oliver Haslam·

A New WiFi Access Point Name Has Been Found That Can Disable Your iPhone’s WiFi

A new WiFi access point name has been discovered yet again, that is capable of disabling an iPhone’s WiFi system to the point of a full device restore being required to get things back up and running.

The access point name, discovered by security researcher Carl Schou, just requires the text “%secretclub%power” to be in it.

According to a series of tweets by Schou, their iPhone was not only prevented from connecting to any WiFi network after coming into contact with the rogue text string, but they weren’t able to get back up and running easily, either.

While similar issues like this are normally fixed by resetting a device’s network settings, that didn’t work here. In fact, the only way Schou was able to regain WiFi access on the impacted device was to fiddle with a plist file during the backup and restoration process.

While it isn’t clear exactly why this string of text is causing these issues but it’s similar to a report a couple of weeks ago that saw “%p%s%s%s%s%n” also knock out iPhones’ WiFi connections.

Some users have reported that they are unable to replicate this behavior when using a device running iOS 15, suggesting Apple might have already fixed it. We won’t be running any tests to confirm, though, and we suggest you don’t either.

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