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We knew 30 years ago that message attachments (mostly email at that time) were a huge security problem. All those binary file types to parse... what could go wrong ;)

It's good to see Apple's Lockdown mode having such success by simply disabling message attachments.

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I know you're not being serious, but for anyone who may not realize that, it does more than disabling attachments. Lockdown Mode's "optional, extreme" protection substantially changes the experience of using your device. https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120

One would hope there would be some sanitization of attachments to prevent this.

I also wish there was a regular option in iOS Messages to disable link previews.

Apple (and Google fwiw) do in fact have impressive hardening around their parsers.

There's a ton of sanitization of attachments. It just isn't foolproof.

On iOS messages attachments are decoded in a separate, heavily restricted and sandboxed process, and the decoded sanitized results are sent back to the UI process. It just isn't perfect.

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