May 2015's last days were greeted by news of a terrible bug plaguing Apple iOS' text messaging service. Today, reports surface saying that the bug could go so far as to affect other text-based apps like Twitter and Snapchat.

The glitch, said to have been discovered by a couple of Reddit users, involved sending a single text message with a pre-defined string of Arabic, Chinese, or Marathi characters. When iOS is presented with these non-Latin characters in certain specific ways, the system fails to render, and immediately crashes, causing the entire operation to grind to a halt.

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Apparently, the malware message could be sent via text messaging, where it affects iPhones, Mac OS X , iPads, and even the Apple Watch. When the user has notifications enabled by the time the message was sent, the OS will crash immediately upon trying to open the mail through the said notifications.

Unfortunately for iPhone users, this bug became even more powerful as it was revealed that the malware could be spread over social media. Reports claim that the offending string also works on Twitter mentions and Direct Messaging services. The same also works for text messages sent using WhatsApp and Snapchat.

As for the Apple Watch, The Guardian reports that the bug caused iOS to crash when users attempt to reply to the offending message through Siri's voice code.

Nevertheless, a report by CNET has it that the unicode bug does not necessarily crash the OS every time it is sent. For instance, iPhone users may still view the iMessage safely when read from a conversation string (at which point, it is advisable to delete the message immediately). For third-party apps like Twitter, something as simple as turning off notifications also serves to save users from the unicode attack.

According to Forbes, though this issue might seem trivial, hackers could actually capitalize on this bug to extort or disrupt their targets. "An attacker can leverage this issue to cause immediate denial of service issues on affected platforms and applications, however further impact is not yet known and will require further research," Mathew Hickey, principal security consultant for MDSec, stated about the issue.  

Tagssnapchat, text bug