The URL That Will Crash Your iPhone and Mac Safari If You Click It

Posted on the 25 January 2016 by Tftb @TFTB

A new bug has surfaced which is being exploited through the website crashsafari.com (DO NOT VISIT THIS LINK). This link has started to spread on social media few hours ago and it will crash your Safari on iPhone and Mac as soon as you click on it.

The effects are quite different on both the operating systems.

On Mac, Safari will freeze ('Application Not Responding') and you will need to restart your machine to get the browser working again.
On iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), this bug would act differently depending on the click location but might also cause a system reboot.

Now that you know that you should not be clicking on CrashSafari.com, isn't really the end to it. You might think you are safe but let me warm you, you are not safe. Links shared on Twitter automatically use the URL shortener, which makes it hard to be cautious, same goes with Facebook. If people share it with a URL shortener, this would cause a lot of panic. This means it isn't just cause problems via Safari but will also be a problem if a link is clicked from the Facebook App or Twitter App or any other app from which you click the app from. The link will freeze the app from which it is clicked from and cause the same catastrophic issue as caused by Safari.

The code for the website is very simple, it calls the HTML5 History API thousands of times in a loop eventually forcing Safari to give up and freeze.

This bug is known to affect all the latest iOS(9.2.1) and OS X(10.11.4) devices including the beta versions of iOS 9.3 Beta 1.1 and OS X 10.11.4 Beta