New vulnerability forces Apple to disable Walkie-Talkie on Apple Watch

Apple has disabled the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch after the company discovered a critical vulnerability in the app. As the name suggests, the Walkie-Talkie app allows users to place push-to-talk calls through a tweaked form of FaceTime Audio.

This is not the first time a bug has been discovered in Apple’s FaceTime calling feature. Earlier this year, Apple confirmed that a bug allowed users to eavesdrop on others using FaceTime. The company has now disabled the Walkie-Talkie app due to a bug that allowed people to listen in on other iPhones. Apple has released a statement following the discovery of the bug.

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.

– Apple

Apple hasn’t confirmed as to when the app will be enabled back. For now, users will be able to open the app but the calls won’t go through as they have been disabled.

Via TechCrunch