Warning: My kid's smartwatch kept sending weird location pings to an unknown number.

I dug into the companion app's settings (which were a mess, honestly) and found a hidden 'trusted contacts' list from the factory. After I cleared that list and set up fresh 2FA on the account, the pings stopped completely. Has anyone else had to deal with pre-loaded contacts on a kid's device like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

paige87016d ago

Yeah I had the SAME problem with my kid's tablet last year. @richardfox is right about the leftover test code thing because my device had a whole secret admin menu that only showed up after a system update. Factory reset plus removing every preloaded contact and resetting the permissions finally killed the ghost pings for good.

the_seth2mo ago

Is this actually a security problem or just some leftover factory test setting? Most of that stuff is harmless junk code that never got cleaned up. You probably just fixed a glitch, not stopped a hacker.

richardfox2mo ago

Actually, I saw a tech article about this last week. They said leftover test code can sometimes create open doors for real attacks later. It's not always just harmless junk.