Apple is withdrawing the Walkie Talkie app for Apple Watch indefinitely. A bug, in fact, would allow you to spy on the iPhone of the interlocutor
Apple takes cover and plays in advance, before someone notices and breaks out yet another privacy alarm: the Walkie Tolkie app for Apple Watch has been temporarily disabled because of a flaw that would allow you to spy, through a smartwatch of the bitten apple, a user with an iPhone.
The Walkie Talkie app on the Apple Watch allows two users who have accepted each other's invitation to receive audio chats via a "push to talk" interface, but the vulnerability discovered by Apple could allow one person to listen to another customer's iPhone without their consent. The discovery of the vulnerability is due to a report on Apple's dedicated portal and the Cupertino company believes that still this flaw has never been used by any hacker to spy on users. However, as a precaution, it preferred to disable the dangerous app indefinitely.
Apple's response
Since prevention is better than cure, both in medicine and in computer science and, especially, in marketing, Apple has cut the bull's eye and while waiting to find a solution to the problem has completely disabled the Walkie Talkie app. In a note, the company explained, "We have just become aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the feature while we attempt to quickly resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore functionality as soon as possible." In the same note Apple resizes the problem, explaining that in order to exploit the flaw "specific conditions and sequences of events are required".
Mistakes can be learned
The extreme caution of Apple in the management of this vicissitude is not at all casual, but the result of the last experiences of the house of Cupertino. In January, for example, it was revealed a big bug in the FaceTime app that allowed malicious people to spy on us through the feature of group calls. In that case it was enough to launch a "Group Call" to start a sort of pre-listening even before the user received the ring on his iPhone. A few days ago, instead, a researcher of Google's Project Zero has discovered that it's enough to send through iMessage a message containing an anomalous string of text to block forever an iPhone sending it in tilt and forcing it to continuous reboot.