Flipper Zero Can Even Crash Your iPhone. The only workaround right now is to disable Bluetooth to protect against annoying pop-ups or hacks that could crash your iPhone.
Security researchers have discovered that iPhones updated to iOS 17 are vulnerable to a Bluetooth attack that uses the Flipper Zero device and can crash the phone. Security researcher Jeroen van der Ham was hit by this attack on a train ride last month, and his phone displayed multiple pop-ups before rebooting, Ars Technica reported.
Van der Ham discovered that the attacker, another passenger on the train, used a Flipper Zero device with custom firmware to send a combination of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) alerts to nearby iPhone phones running iOS 17.
Flipper Zero is a very powerful device that we described last year as the Swiss army knife of antennas. It's a small orange and white plastic gadget with a 1,4-inch screen that looks like a child's toy. Flipper Zero is an all-purpose tool for hacking, as it talks to sub-1GHz devices like old garage doors, RFID devices, NFC cards, infrared devices, and of course, Bluetooth devices.
TechCrunch first reported the Bluetooth pop-up attacks last month. These can affect iPad devices as well, but now it looks like there's a special "iOS 17 Lockup Crash" in custom Flipper Xtreme firmware that can actually crash and crash an iPhone. The attack doesn't affect iPhones running older iOS versions (like iOS 16), so it appears that Apple changed something in its latest operating system update to make iPhones susceptible to this form of attack.
A similar attack can also be used on Android devices and Windows laptops. BleepingComputer reported last week that Bluetooth spam attacks could be used to generate a never-ending number of pop-ups on Samsung Galaxy phones. You can protect against this by disabling the nearby sharing notification on Android, and the attack does not appear to crash Android devices.
If you have an iPhone running iOS 17, the only reliable way to protect against pop-ups and crash attacks is to disable Bluetooth. This isn't very practical if you regularly use an Apple Watch or Bluetooth headset, but if you're somewhere where someone might use Flipper Zero, it's worth considering until Apple updates iOS 17 to protect against these attacks. Apple's latest iOS 17.1 update did not fix the problem.
We've reached out to Apple for comment on the Flipper Zero attack and will let you know if the company responds.
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