Home » News » Is the ‘acropalypse’ bug set to impact your iPhone and Mac?

Is the ‘acropalypse’ bug set to impact your iPhone and Mac?

(Image Credit Google)
Image credit : USA Today While we don't frequently focus on security vulnerabilities affecting Android and Windows devices, one did this week. This phenomenon, known as "acropalypse," affects screenshots and photographs that have been cropped using the built-in software on Pixel phones and Windows 11 Desktops. The problem, which was found by programmer Simon Aarons, is an odd one. Aarons discovered that the information that was purportedly cropped out wasn't actually destroyed from the image and could be restored with some simple research while examining photos that had been cropped using the Markup tool only available on Pixel phones. Even a small demo app was created by him to show off. As if that wasn’t bad enough, a similar bug was discovered by Chris Blume and confirmed by David Buchanan that affects the Snipping Tool in Windows 11. When a screenshot is cropped using Windows' Snipping Tool and saved over the original, the cropped area is not visible but is also not completely removed. As Blume explains: “I opened a 198 byte PNG with Microsoft’s Snipping Tool, chose ‘Save As’ to overwrite a different PNG file (no editing), and saved a 4,762 byte file with all that extra after the PNG IEND chunk.” That implies the smaller cropped file is larger than the original image. Like the Pixel bug, that data can be recovered with little effort. Most of the time, the cropped-out portion probably isn’t all that important, but it could be something sensitive or embarrassing that the user wouldn’t want anyone else to see. Microsoft and Google are expected to issue patches to fix the vulnerability in an upcoming update. One thing is certain: Apple devices are unaffected. It's unclear whether the bugs affecting Pixel phones and Windows PCs are connected or merely coincidental. Users of Macs and iPhones don't need to be concerned about the "acropalypse" issue spreading to those devices. The cropped photos were always noticeably smaller than the original images when we tested them using the screenshot tool on the Mac and the crop tool in Photo on the iPhone, indicating that the necessary data had been removed.

By Awanish Kumar

I keep abreast of the latest technological developments to bring you unfiltered information about gadgets.

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