Apple got into hot water earlier this week when it was discovered that there is a massive security flaw in FaceTime, which allowed people to eavesdrop on others in group calls even if the recipient had not attended the call. Although Apple disabled Group FaceTime, authorities in New York launched a probe against the company in an effort to figure out how this problem was not mitigated despite being reported to Apple a week prior to public exposure. Now, the Cupertino tech giant has issued an apology, and has stated that the flaw in FaceTime will be resolved next week.
In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple stated that it had resolved the FaceTime bug internally, and will roll out the patch to the public next week. It also issued an apology, saying that:
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 apologize 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 wording "as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime" is rather interesting, since the flaw was reported to Apple by a teenager more than a week before it was publicly disclosed. We'll let you know when the FaceTime update is rolled out.
Source: 9to5Mac
32 Comments - Add comment