I need someone to tell me if I'm being hopelessly naive or if my wife is being hopelessly paranoid.
My wife and two daughters have just flown into Ireland, to spend the summer with my 80year old mother-in-law. They flew out from SFO, through Chicago O'Hare, to Dublin, and connected to three different airports' WiFi on their iPhones and Mac laptops. They're doing everything right, including being tested for COVID-19 before flying, being fully vaccinated, and quarantining for five days in Dublin.
They are quarantining in a house owned by my wife's sister's husband's family. The house has broadband and a provider-provided WiFi router, which can't easily have its password changed, but the password is a 16 digit random hexadecimal string. Multiple people have connected to the router, since the house has been used over the past 18 months for family and friends to quarantine after being exposed to someone with COVID, or just to have a few days on their own.
When my wife connects to the router on her iPhone 12, she eventually gets strange things happening. It has become unresponsive, unlocked our front door, made a phone call to a random coworker from her contacts, and sent random texts to her sister. One of my daughters has had no issues but the other had a Safari web page open up, strangely enough on UC Irvine's Coding Bootcamp page - she has nothing to do with UC Irvine. I think it's probable she accidentally clicked an ad. No one has had any issues with their Macs, and no one else in the past 18 months has had issues when connected to the router.
My wife has had no problems when using cellular data, her sister's phone's WiFi hotspot, or any other WiFi connection in the past.
No one has downloaded any apps since leaving home, and there doesn't appear to be any MDM profiles installed on her phone.
I didn't travel so I'm trying to deal with this remotely. It's difficult because my wife has unplugged the router and is very reluctant to restart it. She did factory-reset it, but she had the same thing happen afterwards, before finally unplugging it.
My tentative conclusion is there is some sort of hardware interference between her phone and the router, that caused her phone to stop responding immediately to her screen taps. She then tapped randomly and accidentally opened up different apps, as the phone handled the taps.
I came to this conclusion because it seems supremely unlikely that someone would have discovered a way to gain easy access to iPhones, and would use it to prank a random suburbanite (not a suburban housewife, she has a full time career).
Ideally she would take her phone to an Apple Store, but the nearest one is over 100 miles away (why does Belfast have one and not Dublin), and since she's quarantining she couldn't do it anyway until Friday.
So, does my conclusion make sense? I haven't found any reports of similar things happening on WiFi, and everyone says it's impossible to remotely hack into an iPhone.
My wife and two daughters have just flown into Ireland, to spend the summer with my 80year old mother-in-law. They flew out from SFO, through Chicago O'Hare, to Dublin, and connected to three different airports' WiFi on their iPhones and Mac laptops. They're doing everything right, including being tested for COVID-19 before flying, being fully vaccinated, and quarantining for five days in Dublin.
They are quarantining in a house owned by my wife's sister's husband's family. The house has broadband and a provider-provided WiFi router, which can't easily have its password changed, but the password is a 16 digit random hexadecimal string. Multiple people have connected to the router, since the house has been used over the past 18 months for family and friends to quarantine after being exposed to someone with COVID, or just to have a few days on their own.
When my wife connects to the router on her iPhone 12, she eventually gets strange things happening. It has become unresponsive, unlocked our front door, made a phone call to a random coworker from her contacts, and sent random texts to her sister. One of my daughters has had no issues but the other had a Safari web page open up, strangely enough on UC Irvine's Coding Bootcamp page - she has nothing to do with UC Irvine. I think it's probable she accidentally clicked an ad. No one has had any issues with their Macs, and no one else in the past 18 months has had issues when connected to the router.
My wife has had no problems when using cellular data, her sister's phone's WiFi hotspot, or any other WiFi connection in the past.
No one has downloaded any apps since leaving home, and there doesn't appear to be any MDM profiles installed on her phone.
I didn't travel so I'm trying to deal with this remotely. It's difficult because my wife has unplugged the router and is very reluctant to restart it. She did factory-reset it, but she had the same thing happen afterwards, before finally unplugging it.
My tentative conclusion is there is some sort of hardware interference between her phone and the router, that caused her phone to stop responding immediately to her screen taps. She then tapped randomly and accidentally opened up different apps, as the phone handled the taps.
I came to this conclusion because it seems supremely unlikely that someone would have discovered a way to gain easy access to iPhones, and would use it to prank a random suburbanite (not a suburban housewife, she has a full time career).
Ideally she would take her phone to an Apple Store, but the nearest one is over 100 miles away (why does Belfast have one and not Dublin), and since she's quarantining she couldn't do it anyway until Friday.
So, does my conclusion make sense? I haven't found any reports of similar things happening on WiFi, and everyone says it's impossible to remotely hack into an iPhone.