Apple Watch Walkie-Talkie app has a vulnerability which leads to allow people to listen in to each others iPhones. Apple have been unable to tell if the vulnerability has been exploited as of yet, and have not confirmed any details on how this can.
Here’s Apple’s statement to TechCrunch:
“We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent. We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.”
Walkie-Talkie used a form of FaceTime audio and was added to the watch last year in the OS 5. The app will remain installed but with no function for now.
This isn’t the first issue with FaceTime this year, following an issue discovered in January, which allowed people to listen in on devices before a call was answered.
