The tech giant noticed the vulnerability upon receiving a direct report via their portal. As mentioned in 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.Since the bug in Walkie Talkie app clearly risked users’ privacy, Apple deemed it right to disable the app until a fix.
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.
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.The firm, for now, is working out a patch to address the flaw. Once done, they will roll out the fix to the consumers. Until then, the app will remain disabled, for which Apple apologized in their statement.
We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.Earlier this year, Apple also patched a similar eavesdropping bug affecting Facetime. Due to a glitch in the group-calling feature of the app, the caller could hear the user on the other end even before the user opts to answer or reject the call. Apple also rewarded Grant Thompson with a bug bounty for reporting the flaw to the firm.
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