She told me in confidence that she had encountered an iPhone that was in her words, possessed. She had started working with it as a normal semi skeptical trained technician who had a sizable experience with her profession.

She told me that a client had brought in the phone and that it kept doing odd things. Mainly via Siri. Calling numbers seemingly randomly, playing music at odd hours, operating apps, and so on.

Because the iPhone continued to run the odd behaviors in the shop. The technician drew on her experience to speculate that maybe there was static in the microphones or a loose connection with the touchscreen. She gave it a complete rebuild and retuned it to the customer. A few days later the phone was back with the same complaints.

Since so much effort had already been expended on this phone it was replaced for the customer. The technician put the old phone on the workstation and didn’t pay much attention to it for awhile. Then, she noticed that in the interim it had not only continued with the odd behaviors, but that they formed a pattern. They weren’t random behaviors. The numbers it dialed were consistent and the music it played indicated a preference.

This was really early in the iPhone era and the hack kits weren’t widely available. I don’t know if you remember the struggles of the LEOs to access locked iPhones. Today, what you suggest is definitely horses and not zebras. If it was a hack, it would have been custom.

However, the tech did suspect it might be a firmware hack somewhere in the main board which was inserted when the board was built. (I vaguely recall that there were issues with that at the time. Especially, on jump drives.) Her investigation of this possibility was negligible due to the fact that a replacement phone was cheaper than going to that level of repair. The test for that might’ve required two phones and they were still scarce.

that's like fingernails on a blackboard. I don't know why they thought people would like it. Fortunately there are a few alternate voices so I chose a rather bland male voice that at least doesn't annoy me. I haven't tried many of the other features, just stuck to the original ones like turning lights on and off.