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by sebazzz 845 days ago
I wonder how such hack would even work. The watch does have the option to control it remotely, through the iPhone accessibility options, but obviously this only works with the paired iPhone and not over the internet.
3 comments

> but obviously this only works with the paired iPhone and not over the internet.

That's the intended design, but perhaps the trusted device layer could be bypassed under some circumstance? It seems extremely unlikely, but maybe not impossible.

edit: The more I read and think about this, the less I think it's likely. I'll keep this as a devil's advocate sort of message, but I feel like I should still point out that the entire premise here seems a little nuts and the people reporting the hacks are more likely to be uninformed/paranoid/etc and dealing with ghost touches than the watches were likely to be compromised.

That multiple people reported a "spam" phone call right before the incident makes it look like they've found some zero day cellular exploit.

If this is for real I expect we'll hear more about it soon enough.

Only one person reported the spam call in that thread, the Marcus-II commenter. Their comment shows up twice in the first page and once on the second page. No one else mentions the spam call.
The baseband processor is entirely separate, with some basic commands and responses communicated from the phone's CPU to the baseband, so even this explanation is suspect.
No one is burning a baseband 0day to write "we are in control" on a screen.
Apple Employees can certainly access your devices remotely, I have seen it happening with iPhone, I don’t know about Watch.

Nevertheless, this does seem like an anti-Apple campaign.

That's not true. Apple employees can see a video feed of your screen after you accept their support request (similar to screen sharing over FaceTime), but they can't interact with your phone remotely.
Can you be more specific about when an Apple employee remotely accessed your iPhone.

It would almost certainly would be illegal.

I’ve had this happen when I called in a support request for some iOS issue I had. Their interface has all the devices on your Apple ID, and they can enable screen sharing on any of them after you accept it via a notification. I have to admit, it must be a lot better for the support experience as opposed to trying to verbally describe what’s going on.
This seems even more hard to believe and requires even more extraordinary evidence.