Orange_gladioli wrote:
My very old iPhone got hacked and I could see activity in apps without me touching anything.
That wasn’t a hack, it was either problems from a case or screen-protective film, or from a failing display or digitizer. That causes ghost touches and missed touches. Bad hardware. Not a hack.
I bought a more up-to-date phone so I could have IOS 18. I feel I should have done the reset manually. The night before I saw someone type something into a map app. I go to turn my phone off and I can’t. Nobody else has physical access to my phone or has set up anything else in the past. I’ve clamped down on insecure stuff around Amazon and PayPal, I changed my password and using Touch ID on iPad and iPhone, I blocked scammy callers.
If you never reset the iPhone and never transferred ownership to your own Apple Account, well, that would be a big mistake. One you will want to address soonest.
And then I sit watching as someone logs into CNN.
Which app? Remote access would be very rare and very expensive exploit, and unlikely to arise here. Or maybe it’s a display or digitizer issue yet again.
My privacy settings on Safari say 31 trackers didn’t get to me on there but I never went on there.
What Safari calls trackers are web trackers, and are not relevant to getting physically tracked, or getting hacked.
Will locked private browsing make a difference?
No. Private Browsing reduces what data is preserved within a Safari session through to future sessions, but does not change what remote websites can detect. It’s a means to temporarily shut off local history and such. Nothing more. It does not particularly alter what web sites can see and collect for the incoming web connection.
My provider says there is no spam swap.
I am unfamiliar with a “spam swap”, though spammers do technically swap and sell addresses.
I presume SIM swap was intended. SIM swap isn’t relevant to the reported behavior. Among other details, SIM swapping gives access to the telephone number and to number-based security, not to the connected device itself, and not remote access into the device.
I just need to understand what the main problem is otherwise I’m busy sorting a bunch of the wrong ones.
The main issues here will likely be one of the difficulty of the reproducibility of the reported misbehavior, and the failure to properly transfer ownership of the iPhone including performing the expected reset.
