A flaw in the iPhone’s networking functionality is being exploited by malicious Wi-Fi networks again, and this time, it seems like restoring that functionality will be more difficult than expected.
Secret Club founder Carl Schou revealed in June that naming a network “%p%s%s%s%s%n” could disable the Wi-Fi support of any iPhone that connected to it. Schou initially said the problem was permanent, but resetting a device’s networking settings could fix the issue. (Although that would be of little comfort to people who don’t know how to perform that reset.)
Schou is back with another warning: Wi-Fi networks called “%secretclub%power” can reportedly cause the same issue as before, except this time, even resetting an affected device’s networking settings doesn’t appear to resolve the problem. “I have reset network settings a handful of times,” Schou said after his initial disclosure, “force restarted the iPhone and am out of ideas.”
Some folks have said that restoring a device using iTunes might resolve the problem. This solution could lead to some data loss depending on when the device was last backed up, however, and one Twitter user said fixing the problem might also require users to “manually remove” information from “com.apple.wifi.known-networks.plist” before the device is restored.
These flaws could lead to serious problems for iPhone users. All it takes to disable the device’s Wi-Fi connectivity is joining an otherwise harmless network that happens to have a specific name. Resetting network settings was already a fairly esoteric solution to the problem; manually deleting information from a plist is going to be beyond the average person’s capabilities.
