Company says it’s already working on a fix

Jul 11, 2019 12:18 GMT  ·  By

Apple has temporarily disabled the Walkie Talkie app on the Apple Watch after it discovered an issue potentially allowing anyone to listen to users without consent.

Apple says it’s not aware of any exploits of the bug out in the wild, and says it became aware of it through the company’s own vulnerability reporting system.

Albeit Apple has avoided to provide any specifics on the actual issue, this doesn’t seem to be too easy to reproduce, but the firm just wanted to make sure that all users are protected until a patch is shipped.

No signs of eavesdropping just yet

“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,” Apple told TechCrunch in a statement.

“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.”

There are no specifics as to when a patch could land, but it shouldn’t take too long for this to happen.

This isn’t the first time Apple disables a key feature of its devices to protect users. Back in January, Apple became aware of an issue allowing strangers to eavesdrop on FaceTime users even before the call was accepted. Apple temporarily took the group calling feature offline to prevent any exploits from happening, bringing it back to users just a few days later when the fix was ready.