'Every iPhone in the World' at Risk Tomorrow

The iPhone’s text-messaging system has a dangerous flaw that hackers could exploit to take control of your phone, researchers say. They’ll reveal the trouble at a conference tomorrow, Forbes reports. So if you get a text with a “single square character,” turn off your phone right away—it could mean someone’s already trying to take advantage of the bug.

“Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this,” says one of the experts. The bug could let the hacker control all the phone’s functions, including making phone calls and sending texts to other phones. Windows Mobile contains an analogous flaw, researchers say, and both Google’s Android phone and the iPhone had bugs that would allow hackers to disable their network connections—though Google has patched the problem. (More hacker stories.)