A malicious link is doing the rounds, specifically targets smartphones including Apple’s iPhones and Android phones. It can also make PCs and Apple macs running Chrome very sluggish, but the main target is the iPhone.

It started basically as a prank text which would knock out iPhones and was sent normally by friends of the victim. It has since virally spread and can randomly hit.

So what does it do and how does it work?

The link, called crashsafari.com, overloads the browser with a self-generating text string which populates the address bar and becomes increasingly difficult to load.

In layman’s terms, it gives your Apple smartphone’s cpu so much rubbish to perform that it just freezes and crashes, and in the case of Android smartphones, makes them operate  so slowly you would cry….

It takes about 20 seconds or so to force an iPhone to reboot, as the phone significantly heats up as the smartphone tries to handle the code of the site,” stated the report initially published in the Guardian.

For PCs, Macs and Android devices, they do not crash, they just become very slow.

The problem can be solved with a simple reboot of either PC, Mac, Iphone or Android smartphone.

The warning was also published on the My Broadband site.

How do they target me?

They send you a shortcode link to a story. The link looks very similar to the links we send with our WhatsApp and BBM news notifications. So be careful for the next few days about what links you click on. And if your phone does go all crazy, you now know what to do to fix it. Simply turn it off and back on, and you are fixed.

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