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.<p>I read it all the time, "my insta was hacked", etc.<p>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.<p>In this case my skepticism skyrocketed when the hackers write "we are in control".
This is so hard to believe that I simply don't.<p>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.<p>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is beyond believability.
One of the posters posted a video of the problem: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6dazJk9AtU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6dazJk9AtU</a><p>It seems like the ghost touch issue, and not actual hacking.
> they popped up the keyboard and typed “We are in control”<p>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.
This is probably not hacking, but the ghost touch issue.<p><a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/ghost-touches-are-haunting-some-apple-watch-users-heres-what-to-do-if-youre-affected/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/ghost-touches-are-haunting-som...</a>
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.
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?
This looks very much like the accessibility feature “Control Watch with iPhone” when AssistiveTouch color is set to Grey in the Watch accessibility settings…<p><a href="https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/watch/apd890848603/watchos" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-my/guide/watch/apd890848603/wat...</a>
I had a similar issue a few days ago. Watch started pressing random buttons and wouldn’t let me intervene. After a while it stopped.<p>The presses were completely random and amounted to nothing. Looked like the process that reads touch went into an infinite loop of some sort.<p>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.
Thus is very likely the screen ghosting issue that Apple is currently investigating: <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/13/apple-watch-false-touches-issue/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/13/apple-watch-false-touch...</a>
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?<p>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.<p>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.
My clever idea to explain this is:<p>It's a factory test script is getting triggered on the watch somehow.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
This is likely related? <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/10/apple-watch-series-9-ultra-2-touch-screen-issue/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/10/apple-watch-series-9-ul...</a><p>Edit: A hardware issue that appears like a remote take over?
I believe it may be the ghost touch issue like others mention, but with the addition that watchOS 10.3 dropped a week or two prior to these reports.<p>Possible it tried to do something about the ghost touch and made it worse in a subset of devices.<p>That feels more likely than a bunch of random people all being targeted with no other commonality like region or status
Based on others comments, and the fact it's only Ultras 2 and series 9 is it hacking or ghosting issue?<p><a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/10/apple-watch-series-9-ultra-2-touch-screen-issue/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/10/apple-watch-series-9-ul...</a>
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.
This whole thread is filled with terrible advice and wannabe Snow-Crash writers, plus people who think "hackers" are scrolling through your files just to get to your fitness files.<p>I am kind of shocked, that state of mind was acceptable around 95-2000, but not a quarter millennium later.<p>I for sure live i a bubble, but are people really like that?
I had exactly the same problem last week. Random touch & drags on the watch, it took me some effort to shutdown the watch without making an accidental emergency call.<p>Given apple's security track of record and the fact that I pose no value as a target for the such an hacking effort. I deducted that it just was ghost touch.
Modern software is bad enough that I wouldn't be surprised if this is true, but the modern stock marked is also detached from reality enough, that I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt at market manipulation either.
I had a similar issue with my Apple Watch a couple weeks back. It would randomly input touches without me interacting with the display at all.<p>I restarted it and the issue was gone - I doubt there was any hacking involved.
This happened to my watch; it was not a fun day at all. Not sure if it was a glitch or a hack but it was very disconcerting and I did a full factory reset, re-pair and a different passcode.
If governments can hack your devices, so can private bad actors.
<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/13/middleeast/khashoggi-apple-watch-analysis-intl/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/13/middleeast/khashoggi-apple-wa...</a>
Apple has a strong security track record, and its devices are generally considered to be more secure than other brands. However, no device is completely immune to hacking... This is the first time i've heard about Apple Watch hack
This has nothing to do with hacking and everything to do with the ghost touch issues that apparently affect multiple Series 9 and Ultra 2 users (although I’ve not seen it on my series 9 myself).<p>Way back in the early days of Android (pre Ice Cream Sandwich), I spoke to one co-worker who told me that when they looked at their Google Map app while driving it would show their actual physical car (and all the other surrounding vehicles etc.) on the satellite view - in motion - in real time.<p>No manner of attempts by me to state why this was impossible would dissuade them and they went away thinking I was the technical idiot as a result.<p>So “we are in control”?<p>Yeah, no.<p>This is what happens when folk think that shows like NCIS and their ilk are factual based docudramas.<p>Obligatory link: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=14&v=u8qgehH3kEQ&feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=14&v=u8qgehH3kEQ&feature=youtu...</a>
I think the OP in the linked thread is a complete hoax, and all the commenters are experiencing the random phantom/ghost input issues, googling it and hitting that thread. If you read carefully they all sound like their watch is receiving random inputs.