Ask HN: Is My iPhone Hacked?

Firstly, I have “speak selection” enabled on my iPhone 8 (this is in Accessibility -> Speech). I use that to read articles aloud sometimes when I’m working.

I was reading (actually reading, not using “speak selection”) comments on a thread on the HN homepage about prediction markets when I copied something that somebody wrote in a comment, and when I went to paste it into a new tab to search, out of habit I quickly went to click “paste and search”, but despite this being a new tab (no URL), the “speak” button appeared next to the “paste and search” button and I clicked that instead by accident.

Siri proceeded to speak in Russian for no less than five seconds.

In trying to determine how much text Siri spoke, I went to google translator and produced some Russian text, and I determined that Siri must have spoken 20+ words.

I haven’t been to any Russian websites, or anything with Russian text, and my clipboard contained only a few ASCII characters. Safari didn’t have any history.

I don’t speak Russian, but I definitely can recognize Russian, or at least Eastern Slavic, so it could potentially have been Ukrainian or Belarusian, but I’m fairly sure it was Russian.

To summarize what action I accidentally took, I clicked the tab management button (overlapping squares) on the bottom right in Safari, clicked the + and in the new, blank tab, I held my finger in the URL bar for a second to ger the “paste and search” button to appear, which is when the “speak” button unexpectedly appeared and I clicked it.

I have not since been able to reproduce this situation.