FRANCISCO, Feb 2: US hi-tech giant Apple has apologised for a Group FaceTime security flaw that could potentially cause users’ conversations to be eavesdropped without their knowledge.
“We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week. We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug. We sincerely apologise to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process,” Apple said in a statement on Friday.
The security flaw was discovered by a 14-year-old boy in Arizona while he was group FaceTiming with friends on January 19, and he happened to find that he could listen to his friend, even if the friend didn’t answer his call for live chat.
The boy’s mother, Michele Thompson, told media earlier that she had tried to report the bug to Apple.
The bug, which was made public and went viral on social media in the past several days, impacts iPhones and iPads installed with iOS 12.1, and Apple PCs running macOS Mojave, which have recently added Group FaceTime feature.
“We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix. We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible. We take the security of our products extremely seriously and we are committed to continuing to earn the trust Apple customers place in us,” the statement added.
(UNI)
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