Apple Confirms Mac and iOS Devices Vulnerable to Intel, ARM Chip Flaws

Apple has admitted that all its iPhone, Mac and iPad devices are affected by security flaws which leave them vulnerable to hackers, but the company stressed there are no known exploits impacting users.

In a new press release, Apple has admitted that all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected but are safe at the moment. According to Apple, it is working on software updates to fix a pair of vulnerabilities which affect Apple gadgets as well as “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,” the tech giant said. “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 such as the App Store.”

Security researchers revealed the existence of the flaws on Wednesday, which could allow crooks to hack most computers or devices made in the past decade. One of the flaws has been called Meltdown, and affects only Intel Corp chips, and the second is called Spectre and impacts nearly all computer chips made in the past 10 years.

Meltdown affects Intel processors (like those in Macs), and it makes it possible to overcome fundamental kernel security protection in such a way as to interfere with, send or see application data.

The Spectre bug, on the other hand, exists deep inside Intel, ARM (which iOS devices are based on) and AMD processor architecture, attackers can exploit it to access critical and highly protected information, passwords, encrypted communications and more.

“Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2 and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown,” the press release explained. “Apple Watch is not affected by Meltdown.”

“In the coming days, we plan to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre. We continue to develop and test further mitigations for these issues and will release them in upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS,” Apple added.