Getting iPhone near this cursed network cuts off its Wifi

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Photo: Noah Berger/AFP (Getty Images)

A security researcher and his iPhone’s wifi has become curiously familiar with Murphy’s Law in the past few weeks. Based on his experience, we now know about wifi another curse that we should avoid. But this time, your iPhone doesn’t have to connect to the network for it to mess up.

In June, security researcher Carl Schou discovered that when he joined the network “%p%s%s%s%s%n”, his iPhone permanently disabled its wifi functions. Fortunately, this was fixed by resetting all network settings, which erased the villainous wifi name from his phone memory. You would have thought this would have been the end of networking with weird and suspicious names, but you’re not Schou.

On Sunday, he decided to try his luck again by investigating a public wifi called “%secretclub%power”. According to Schou, just having an iOS device near a wifi with that name can permanently disable its wifi functions.

He wrote on Twitter: “You can permanently disable WiFI of any iOS device by hosting a public WiFi called %secretclub% power.” “Resetting network settings is not guaranteed to restore functionality.”

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Schou apparently struggled to find his way out of this one and get his wifi functionality back. He said he reset network settings multiple times, forced his iPhone to restart, and even contacted Apple’s device security team. The researcher finally got some help from Twitter, who advised him to manually edit an iPhone backup to remove malicious entries from plist files of known networks.

Gizmodo hasn’t tried this fix, so if you find yourself in this situation, proceed with caution. It is not clear what exactly causes this error, but some believe that the percent sign and the characters following it may be mistaken as a string format specifier, a variable or a command used in markup languages. When addressed by the phone, it seems to lead to problems.

We’ve all been through a couple of tough months (and then some) and the last thing we need is to create public wifi trolls with “%secretclub% power” to make our wifi disappear. Until Apple fixes these bugs in a future update that hopefully arrives sooner rather than later, it might be best to avoid public wifi entirely and rely solely on your iOS device’s mobile data when you’re away from a wifi you know is secure.

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