I don't know what the catalyst for this was, but a lot of 20 years olds and younger seem to use the word hacked so casually.
I read it all the time, "my insta was hacked", etc.
I would really like to know if hacking is as common as it is reported rather than a successful phishing campaign, a simple issue of forgotten password or getting locked out of email, account ban for rule violation, or something else entirely unrelated to actual hacking.
In this case my skepticism skyrocketed when the hackers write "we are in control".
> I don't know what the catalyst for this was, but a lot of 20 years olds and younger seem to use the word hacked so casually.
It is a mechanism of shifting responsibility. If your password is "1234" and you gave it away to a totally legit MS support center employee that called you recently because MS has detected that your iPhone has a virus, then it is on you. But if North Korean hackers compromised your watch via elaborate hacking campaign to mine bitcoin on it, then it is "not your fault".
If the original account is to be believed, they did not know the owner’s passcode/PIN. The attackers gained remote access to a device without the passcode/PIN. This suggests it was not phishing.
It sounds like a legitimate usage of the word “hacked” to me. Maybe not the most critical vulnerability because they did not gain full access, but they managed to gain some level of control of the owner’s watch without their permission, and it sounds like the reason was not that they left it lying around unlocked (to be clear it sounds like they got control because the watch was unlocked in the owner’s wrist, but they were accessing it wirelessly- sounds like an issue with Apple’s security model that can be fixed).
My Skype account was hacked many years ago. It started with me getting an email about some credits being added (from my credit card that was in the system).
When I logged onto Skype, I had a new name, and a new contact, both of which were Ivan something. I immediately started chatting with Ivan, who told me that there was a weakness in the Skype login security, which he tried to exploit.
I changed my password to another Medium to Strong password, and a few minutes later my name was again changed to “Anders xoxo Hafreager”, and a message that he had hacked me again.
So true. Normies be using security questions like “What was your fist dog called?” while posting about their first dog’s name in public #insta while complaining about being targeted by a 1337 h4x0r.
Hacking is largely used to mean the breaching of a system by some unauthorized actor, and why shouldn't it? Word meanings change over time and this one got broader.
That said, phishing is a form of hacking the individual so even by a strict definition it still works.
Not sure if catalyst, but if the crowd learns something it is corpos and governments telling almost always the same story of getting hacked, cyberattacked, with the worst of criminal energy, even if its the most simple letting unpatched (more 1000days then 0days) software run or pretty much unsecured systems out open in the wild.. it is the common excuse everywhere for not understanding of an admitted for most too complex tech world.
Anecdotal, but 17 years ago it was also common to say "my runescape got hacked!" when in fact you typed your password on some runes-cape.freewebs.biz :)
Perhaps there is more to hack? At least when I was 20 years old, the only thing to be hacked was the dial-phone, a paper phonebook and perhaps a fax. Social media didn't exist.
Having so many accounts where some stuff might (or might not) be important, folks get very sensitive to being "hacked". Or in other words, having a stranger break in and rummage through their underwear.
Hack in popular tongue has always meant authentication breaches in general, the method is not important. It's been this way for as long as internet has been a household word.
I mean, there is Apple Watch Mirroring, which does allow remote control of an Apple Watch for accessibility purposes. If they were able to somehow exploit that, I would consider it hacking.
I sort of hate how this thread immediately rallied around “must be crazy people hallucinating” and I hope Apple takes the reports a bit more seriously & investigates.
Edit: I do agree that passwords guessed or phished doesn’t count in my mind as hacking.
Either the user had a bad digitizer, and misread and/or hallucinated the "We are in control" message, or the entire story is made up. Perhaps a group of people working together to post "Hey me too!" stories? I'm not sure what the motive would be, though.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is beyond believability.
> they popped up the keyboard and typed “We are in control”
This reads like bad hacking fiction, complete with the guy typing that wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Why the hell would the (hypothetical) attacker lose precious time doing something like that.
I wonder why most of the comments take it very casually and say may be issue with digitizer/ghost touch. Had it been any other OEM, this would have been such a big issue with anecdotes of why people trust apple products.
If you were genuinely remotely hacking a smartwatch, you’d be executing background processes to exfiltrate data entirely invisible to the user, not doing some bizarre remote desktop thing randomly tapping around on apps. The claim doesn’t pass the sniff test irrespective of the manufacturer.
From experience, you really can't just take user reports at face value. There's almost always something there, but it may or may not be what the user thinks it is.
So it's a good idea to apply Occam's razor.
Digitizer/ghost touch is probably the simplest explanation.
The only thing the hacked/pwned idea has going for it is the "We are in control" message, which is still a bit marginal if the watch really was hacked. (None of the other posts mention this and why would a hacker type that message in? Could be because it's a practical joke or maybe part of a phishing attack, but those are tenuous and nothing else mentioned supports those.)
If you have access to control the touch interface or to type a message on the screen you already have full control to the device. Look at the video, the input is so random, it's a software bug.
iOS developers who have done work for watchOS know that, during development, you are barely able to connect an Apple Watch to Xcode. It is flaky as hell. So thinking that someone can remotely control an Apple Watch is a bit hard to believe.
Ghost touches and typing "we are in control" with predictive text, sounds more plausible but still raises an eyebrow.
I think the "We are in control" thing is a dead giveaway that this is fake. Communicating with the victim might be essential to get access, but afterwards it's just about extracting whatever you need as fast as possible in my understanding.
Is it possible there’s an exploit to remotely touch, which at first looked random, but as people figured it out learned to actually operate the device?
let's imagine that that's the case.
imagine that you are the attacker that figured that out, what are you going to do?
start attacking random people with random clicks on their screen or keep it in private until you figure out details how to make it useful?
thats why this sound like some kind of hardware malfunction (or some substance on touch screen - I personally experienced ghost touches on my phone from dirty screen) or it's some kind of prank by kids using some flipper and previously authorized device or something similar
This looks very much like the accessibility feature “Control Watch with iPhone” when AssistiveTouch color is set to Grey in the Watch accessibility settings…
Apple Watch does have a remote control feature, intended for controlling the watch from your phone, as part of the accessibility options. It's certainly technically possible that this feature is being abused to get access to data that would otherwise be locked down by Apple's strict sandbox post-exploitation.
Or, more likely, it's some kind of shitty prank by someone nearby to the users.
First of all, why would anyone even care about you enough to want to steal whatever health data is available? Is there any particularly sensitive personal info stored there?
Second, presumably if one gains access to the device through a sophisticated hack they'd probably also be able to exfiltrate data without having to alert the user.
With all of that being said, I wish there was some sort of black box mechanism for logging certain events in such a way that the device itself can't tamper with it. That way you'd have a log that can be easily analyzed to judge whether or not a hack is likely to have taken place. Right now if you open the syslog on an Apple device it's filled with so much crap that it's basically impossible to detect if anything nefarious was likely to be happening.
> First of all, why would anyone even care about you enough to want to steal whatever health data is available? Is there any particularly sensitive personal info stored there?
This is a strange argument. Of course there can be sensitive data there. Photos, (i)Messages, eMail, calendar events, addressbook, health data, voice recordings, location data. The device is password-protected for a reason.
It is also usually connected to a paired iPhone and to the Internet. You might be able to do some shady stuff with the phone using private APIs.
> .. I wish there was some sort of black box mechanism for logging certain events in such a way that the device itself can't tamper with it..
This is called an append-only log. It can be built in many ways. Which way is suitable largely depends on the security requirements.
My personal favorite kind of append-only logging is transparency logging. If you'd like to learn more you can check out e.g. sigsum.org, an open-source project my colleagues and I have been working on for several years now.
It's a factory test script is getting triggered on the watch somehow.
It would normally be run near the end of the manufacturing process to ensure everything is working as expected. It automatically runs through a series of steps hitting a wide swath of watch functionality and would look a lot like someone rifling through a watch remotely. But a persons watch wouldn't have test data or factory password, so the script soon ends up getting the watch locked (or maybe that's just part of the test).
It could even conceivably type the message "We are in control" (though I have my doubts about that part of the story), because, as those of us who know some hardware verification folks, that's right where their sense of humor is.
If this is actually a bug as most of you think. It's likely a hardware bug and all these devices are kinda faulty? Isn't that the real news here.
If it's an hardware issue with touch it just means that no software patch can actually fix it enough to not waste battery in future. And that there is a realistic change that the issue gets worse when the devices get older.
There’s a feature to use your iPhone to do keyboard input on an Apple Watch. Could it be that? Don’t tell me Apple left out some authentication. I know you can do something similar with text input when you’re on the same network as an Apple TV and someone’s inputting text. It’ll prompt on your iPhone to submit keyboard input.
[+] [-] MichaelMug|2 years ago|reply
I read it all the time, "my insta was hacked", etc.
I would really like to know if hacking is as common as it is reported rather than a successful phishing campaign, a simple issue of forgotten password or getting locked out of email, account ban for rule violation, or something else entirely unrelated to actual hacking.
In this case my skepticism skyrocketed when the hackers write "we are in control".
[+] [-] caskstrength|2 years ago|reply
It is a mechanism of shifting responsibility. If your password is "1234" and you gave it away to a totally legit MS support center employee that called you recently because MS has detected that your iPhone has a virus, then it is on you. But if North Korean hackers compromised your watch via elaborate hacking campaign to mine bitcoin on it, then it is "not your fault".
[+] [-] parsimo2010|2 years ago|reply
It sounds like a legitimate usage of the word “hacked” to me. Maybe not the most critical vulnerability because they did not gain full access, but they managed to gain some level of control of the owner’s watch without their permission, and it sounds like the reason was not that they left it lying around unlocked (to be clear it sounds like they got control because the watch was unlocked in the owner’s wrist, but they were accessing it wirelessly- sounds like an issue with Apple’s security model that can be fixed).
[+] [-] whycome|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvakkefly|2 years ago|reply
When I logged onto Skype, I had a new name, and a new contact, both of which were Ivan something. I immediately started chatting with Ivan, who told me that there was a weakness in the Skype login security, which he tried to exploit.
I changed my password to another Medium to Strong password, and a few minutes later my name was again changed to “Anders xoxo Hafreager”, and a message that he had hacked me again.
I still don’t know what he did or how he did it.
[+] [-] teekert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lagadu|2 years ago|reply
That said, phishing is a form of hacking the individual so even by a strict definition it still works.
[+] [-] pflenker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwbadubadu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Towaway69|2 years ago|reply
Having so many accounts where some stuff might (or might not) be important, folks get very sensitive to being "hacked". Or in other words, having a stranger break in and rummage through their underwear.
[+] [-] konart|2 years ago|reply
Different times.
[+] [-] exadeci|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eviks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|2 years ago|reply
I sort of hate how this thread immediately rallied around “must be crazy people hallucinating” and I hope Apple takes the reports a bit more seriously & investigates.
Edit: I do agree that passwords guessed or phished doesn’t count in my mind as hacking.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|2 years ago|reply
Either the user had a bad digitizer, and misread and/or hallucinated the "We are in control" message, or the entire story is made up. Perhaps a group of people working together to post "Hey me too!" stories? I'm not sure what the motive would be, though.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is beyond believability.
[+] [-] rockbruno|2 years ago|reply
It seems like the ghost touch issue, and not actual hacking.
[+] [-] Toutouxc|2 years ago|reply
This reads like bad hacking fiction, complete with the guy typing that wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. Why the hell would the (hypothetical) attacker lose precious time doing something like that.
[+] [-] smilespray|2 years ago|reply
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ghost-touches-are-haunting-som...
[+] [-] tinycoder25|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeppester|2 years ago|reply
I don't doubt that this might be nothing, but seeing all these commenters completely dismissing it is rather odd.
Hopefully Apple is less dismissive of this potential security issue.
[+] [-] nicolas_t|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yreg|2 years ago|reply
If this is a software (or somehow even a hardware) issue, than it's still not positive for Apple.
[+] [-] jmull|2 years ago|reply
So it's a good idea to apply Occam's razor.
Digitizer/ghost touch is probably the simplest explanation.
The only thing the hacked/pwned idea has going for it is the "We are in control" message, which is still a bit marginal if the watch really was hacked. (None of the other posts mention this and why would a hacker type that message in? Could be because it's a practical joke or maybe part of a phishing attack, but those are tenuous and nothing else mentioned supports those.)
[+] [-] clawoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Astraco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tovkal|2 years ago|reply
Ghost touches and typing "we are in control" with predictive text, sounds more plausible but still raises an eyebrow.
[+] [-] numpad0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rf15|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperhello|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Szpadel|2 years ago|reply
thats why this sound like some kind of hardware malfunction (or some substance on touch screen - I personally experienced ghost touches on my phone from dirty screen) or it's some kind of prank by kids using some flipper and previously authorized device or something similar
[+] [-] melomac|2 years ago|reply
https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/watch/apd890848603/wat...
[+] [-] rollulus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
Or, more likely, it's some kind of shitty prank by someone nearby to the users.
[+] [-] Swizec|2 years ago|reply
The presses were completely random and amounted to nothing. Looked like the process that reads touch went into an infinite loop of some sort.
Has only happened the one time. Lasted about 2 minutes. I may have rebooted the watch to make the issue go away, can’t remember.
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago|reply
Second, presumably if one gains access to the device through a sophisticated hack they'd probably also be able to exfiltrate data without having to alert the user.
With all of that being said, I wish there was some sort of black box mechanism for logging certain events in such a way that the device itself can't tamper with it. That way you'd have a log that can be easily analyzed to judge whether or not a hack is likely to have taken place. Right now if you open the syslog on an Apple device it's filled with so much crap that it's basically impossible to detect if anything nefarious was likely to be happening.
[+] [-] yreg|2 years ago|reply
This is a strange argument. Of course there can be sensitive data there. Photos, (i)Messages, eMail, calendar events, addressbook, health data, voice recordings, location data. The device is password-protected for a reason.
It is also usually connected to a paired iPhone and to the Internet. You might be able to do some shady stuff with the phone using private APIs.
[+] [-] kfreds|2 years ago|reply
This is called an append-only log. It can be built in many ways. Which way is suitable largely depends on the security requirements.
My personal favorite kind of append-only logging is transparency logging. If you'd like to learn more you can check out e.g. sigsum.org, an open-source project my colleagues and I have been working on for several years now.
[+] [-] saagarjha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|2 years ago|reply
It's a factory test script is getting triggered on the watch somehow.
It would normally be run near the end of the manufacturing process to ensure everything is working as expected. It automatically runs through a series of steps hitting a wide swath of watch functionality and would look a lot like someone rifling through a watch remotely. But a persons watch wouldn't have test data or factory password, so the script soon ends up getting the watch locked (or maybe that's just part of the test).
It could even conceivably type the message "We are in control" (though I have my doubts about that part of the story), because, as those of us who know some hardware verification folks, that's right where their sense of humor is.
[+] [-] herbst|2 years ago|reply
If it's an hardware issue with touch it just means that no software patch can actually fix it enough to not waste battery in future. And that there is a realistic change that the issue gets worse when the devices get older.
[+] [-] yreg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidhariri|2 years ago|reply
Edit: A hardware issue that appears like a remote take over?
[+] [-] meindnoch|2 years ago|reply
Ahahahahahahaha. This must be satire!
[+] [-] dagmx|2 years ago|reply
Possible it tried to do something about the ghost touch and made it worse in a subset of devices.
That feels more likely than a bunch of random people all being targeted with no other commonality like region or status
[+] [-] rock_artist|2 years ago|reply
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/10/apple-watch-series-9-ul...
[+] [-] nocsi|2 years ago|reply