It’s been a rough week for Apple – a company that continually talks about how important both privacy and security are to them – rocked by a bug in their Facetime software.
The bug allowed users of Group Facetime to essentially hear the audio from another persons phone before they had even answered the call. Big drama!
Facetime one to one calls were unaffected, and most people wouldn’t know that for the last few days Facetime Group calling has been disabled.
An Apple Spokesperson today told EFTM the bug has been fixed “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.
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 big lesson here for most people is this is exactly why you get software update notifications on your phone. When bugs like this are found, they get fixed, and Apple like Microsoft and others, release software updates.
Install the update folks, always.
