Image credit: Pixabay
Apple reveals all iPhone, Macs and iPads are exposed to security chip flaw
Apple has revealed some potentially very worrying news about almost ALL of their current range of products. We have the details.
Image credit: Pixabay
There aren’t really that many companies that can make an announcement and the whole world stands at attention. Apple is one of those companies, though. The maker of iPhones and Mac Books has revealed that multiple of their devices are vulnerable to major processor flaws.
Before you panic! Apple says updates are already available to protect against the flaw. More protections are also in development.
The flaw affects Apple iPhones, iPads, Mac Computers and even Apple TV products.
Apple’s thoughts – There may be a problem but don’t worry there are no real negatives… yet.
“All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time.”
Apple has advised customers to be extra careful with the software they put on their phones, meaning: Only download apps from the iOS and Mac App Stores. This will reportedly help prevent hackers from being able to use the processor vulnerabilities.
Apple released a support document explaining how they stumbled across the two flaws. They even have names…
“Security researchers have recently uncovered security issues known by two names, Meltdown and Spectre. These issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all computing devices and operating systems. All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time. Since exploiting many of these issues requires a malicious app to be loaded on your Mac or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources.”
Don’t worry if you own an Apple Watch, though, Apple says they are not affected.
According to Apple, the Meltdown and Spectre issues take advantage of a modern CPU performance feature called speculative execution. Speculative execution improves speed by operating on multiple instructions at once—possibly in a different order than when they entered the CPU.
If you do want to read the full technical jargon for each flaw, you can check out the support document in full here.
