AllycatCA wrote:
I posted on 4/1/16 that I had called AppleCare and was told that this passcode change requirement message was prompted by Apple's software (s/w) and that it wasn't malware. I have seen some posts since in which people express concern or that they were told the message was fraudulent, so I re-called AppleCare to confirm. The rep (Mike) knew about the issue immediately and gave a great explanation. He said that the message is in the phones's s/w for corporate phone management purposes. This message can be activated by a company's system administrator when the company has issued phones to its employees and wants the employees to change their passcodes on a periodic basis to aid in the security of corporate devices. For some reason this message is occasionally activated by personally owned phones. He said to ignore it and not to be concerned - it isn't malware. Hope this helps!
Lawrence Finch wrote:
Okay, you need the long explanation. What I posted is correct with respect to your post. Here's the details:
- Apple is a very big company, with hundreds of thousands of employees
- A small group among those hundreds of thousands have the task of managing and moderating ... They are called "hosts" ... Hosts are not engineers.
Anyone else NOT OK with what Lawrence Finch wrote? (Note: edited down for conciseness)
It is not OK that Apple, who is still making Billions of dollars each quarter, even after paying their hundreds of thousands of employees, cannot afford to hire some technical support engineers to respond and look into issues brought up on the forums. I'm sure i'm not the only one who's almost completely stopped clicking into these pages when looking up the answer to a tech problem, as it's incredibly rare to find any solid answer on these pages. These community posts are always just a bunch of frustrated users reporting that they, too, are running into the issue mentioned, and ending with no resolution post.
I included AllycatCA's response because it was informative, thank you for the follow-up AllycatCA! I would also like to remind everyone to take what AppleCare, or ANY support person from ANY company tells you with a grain of salt. For uncommon or new issues they are all too OK giving guesses as answers, but doing some with confidence. Most companies have an internal knowledgebase as well so even if they give the same answer it could just be read off the screen, that's why it was so useful that AllycatCA was able to get some additional info from the rep.
I am the IT Director for my company, with some good experience in IT security. I, too, received the message mentioned in this thread and instantly knew something was wrong. There's no way Apple would (or rather should) require a passcode change with just a 60 minute turnaround time, it's none of their business how we secure our phones from physical access attempts. My company doesn't use MDM for enterprise device management, but I do have an Exchange email set up on the phone. I knew it wasn't a non-Apple app initiating the dialog because I was outside all apps on my homescreen, so at that point if it's being generated from a background non-Apple app I knew it would be a MUCH bigger issue. My worry was that whatever app generated the dialog would also be able to generate realistic looking passcode change screen allowing it to save the passcode as well as potentially using the info entered to change the passcode on the system. Thankfully AllycatCA's response puts much of that fear to bed, it seems clear that there is in fact a bug that accidentally called that dialog box.
What I did when the window popped up was to first hit "Later" as there was no way I was going to click through on a message like that. I did not have Safari or Mail open, just Chrome, Downcast, a popular game and maybe one additional app. I was getting into the car to go get some food at the time. By the time I got to my destination (about 10-15 minutes) I opened up my phone and the message was there again and the time had decremented. It was at this point that I closed the dialog by hitting "Later" again, closed all of my apps and hard reset the phone (holding home button and power button for 6 seconds). When the phone finished restarting the dialog was back, again! As I was in the car I just hit "Later" once more and figured I could look it up when I got home with my food. The dialog never returned.
Here's my non-Apple engineer guess: the phone may have been interrupted in the middle of doing a network call to complete a system function (IE: check for updates, WiFi sync, etc.). I know when I was getting in the car Downcast was trying to refresh my podcast feed from my distant WiFi connection so I disabled WiFi. I don't know why the dialog didn't return later even though it was able to return after a hard reset with no apps running. It may have just been re-generated after the restart, but before it connected to Cellular data, and once I connected to cellular data correctly it might have fixed the issue, or it might have had something to do with getting back home and reconnecting to WiFi, but that's just a guess. I didn't take any of the steps mentioned in this thread. I do not have a Profiles or Device Management screen available in my General Settings, nor did I do anything with my Exchange account. It has been over 5 hours since the issue occurred.
TL;DR: Apple needs tech support on these forums. I had the same issue and just closed all apps and restarted to fix, nothing else.
