The IT Nerd

This morning, I had this pop up on the screen of my iPhone 7 Plus:

I had no idea what this was and there was zero chance I was going to grant access to an application that I didn’t recognize as that’s a excellent way to get pwned by hackers. Thus I clicked “Don’t Allow.” But that got me nowhere as no matter how many times I clicked “Don’t Allow”, the prompt came back.  Thus I was ultimately forced to reboot the iPhone to get rid of this prompt.

My concern was that I had some sort of malware lurking around my phone. So to cover myself, I did two things that I found by searching around the Internet for solutions to this problem, and a third that falls under the category of “just in case.” The first thing that I did comes via this Apple Discussion Boards post:

1. Close Safari completely from the multitasking window by double clicking the Home button and swiping up the Safari preview pane until it disappears from the screen.
2. Go to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data.
3. Do a forced restart of the iPhone.

It made sense to do this as I was thinking that maybe I had picked up some drive by malware via browsing the web that was responsible for this. Thus this would clear it up.

The second thing that I did came from this Reddit post:

1. Turn off all notifications for Twitter in iOS’s settings app.
2. Completely uninstall Twitter.
3. Sign out of iOS’s Twitter in the Settings app.
4. Reinstall Twitter.
5. When you open Twitter, it’ll ask for notification permission. Grant it.

Doing this makes sense as it clears the Twitter app and the data along with it and resets all the permissions too. Now the Reddit post references jailbreaking. I do not jailbreak my phones as that’s another great way to get pwned by hackers. Thus whatever this issue is, it affects non-jailbroken devices as well.

Finally, as an security precaution, I will be changing the password to my Twitter accounts. That way if I have been somehow pwned, at least I will maintain control of my Twitter account.

It still leaves me with this question. What is this “exited?” app and why does it want access to my Twitter accounts? Is this perhaps a bug related to the Twitter app that’s been around for a while (some web results on this go back to 2012), or is it something more sinister? I’d love to know the answer to that question. If you have any feedback on this, please leave a comment below. In the meantime, I will be watching my iPhone carefully to see if this comes back.

This entry was posted on March 31, 2017 at 11:26 am and is filed under Tips with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.