Apple Talks About The Fix For Meltdown And Spectre Vulnerability in macOS and iOS Devices

Apple Watch users doesn't have to worry

Apple finally accepted that its products are vulnerable to some of the most popular bugs in the computing world. On Wednesday, the iPhone maker announced that its all the mac system and iOS devices are not immune against the Meltdown and Spectre. The company also assured its users that the ‘fix’ or ‘mitigations’ are already have been deployed to some devices and will be available soon for others.

The researchers have found the bugs in the Apple devices that puts the user’s personal data at risk. Surprisingly the hardware vulnerabilities were found to affect the longtime trusted processor built by Intel. These bugs work maliciously for the attackers and enable them to breach into the device. However, Apple claimed that it had already taken the measures and released the mitigations for Meltdown in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2. Fortunately, the Apple Watch is safe from the attack as the bugs need an Intel processor to act and it doesn't have any.

On the other hand, the Spectre is another hardware vulnerability needs to be taken care differently. On this, Apple has promised the users to release a new update for Safari on macOS and iOS shortly. “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 macOS or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources such as the Mac App Store.” Apple wrote on its support page.

After the revelation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, the users have also reported the performance issues in the devices. However, Apple has denied any performance related issue and said there is “no measurable reduction” in the performance. The tech giant has made sure that there is no evidence of exploiting the devices using Meltdown and Spectre by the attackers yet.

In case you are curious why Apple is talking about 'mitigation', not a fix for the issue here is the reason. The Meltdown and Spectre leverage the very basic computing operations to act those are not possible to avoid. The mitigate will help the computer to minimize the vulnerability during those actions and protects the device from any potential exploitation. This is not the first time Apple has accepted the flaw in its devices recently, the company that it has throttle down iPhone performance for battery boost up.