Report by Paula Antolini
February 21, 2018 3:04PM EDT
BREAKING NEWS: Virus Infects Bethel High School Phones of Administrators, Teachers and Students, Renders them Unusable in Some Cases
About midday Wednesday, Feb. 21st, numerous smart phones used by administrators, teachers and students were malfunctioning or had stopped working at Bethel High School. This apparently stemmed from a virus email with foreign language text letter in the subject line.
Assistant Principal Ms. Mari Lerz made an announcement on the BHS public address system advising everyone to delete the email from their Chrome books.
No word from the school officials yet.
Developing story.
*****
UPDATE:
Message from Principal Christopher Troetti:
Dear Students, Parents/Guardians,
Today at 12:14pm a student sent an email to the ~BHS-Students group consisting of a single Hindi character in the subject line and in the body of the message. This seemingly innocent email exploits a bug in a certain version of iOS 11 which will make any iPhones running that version crash upon rendering the character.
See info about this bug here: https://www.macworld.co.
Unfortunately, since this character was included in the Subject field, as soon as the email is listed in the mail list (without even reading it) the phone will crash, and potentially continue to crash if the Mail app is chosen as it would list that character in the subject each time. A suggested workaround for affected phones would be to not open the Mail app, if possible, and update to the latest version of iOS 11 which has a fix for this problem. There is no way for our IT department to remove this email from student accounts. If the phone continues to crash, it must be restored through I-tunes.
Until further notice, the ~BHS-Students Group has been disabled. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our IT department will work with students who continue to have problems with their phones.
Sincerely,
Mr. Troetti
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Original story updated 4:04PM EDT.
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