Last week Apple confirmed that its macOS and iOS devices were indeed affected by the Spectre and Meltdown bugs. The company stated that mitigations had already been released in various builds of iOS, macOS, and tvOS, and the good news is that the update for iOS has just been released.
If you own an iOS device and would like to avoid potentially being targeted by hackers and having this vulnerability exploited, you’ll be pleased to learn that Apple has recently released iOS 11.2.2. With this update, Apple has essentially patched the Spectre bug for iOS devices, so you’ll probably want to download this update ASAP.
Note that this is for the Spectre vulnerability because according to Apple, mitigation for Meltdown had already been released in iOS 11.2. “Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown.” This means that with iOS 11.2.2, users should be protected against both the vulnerabilities.
For those unfamiliar, last week there was a report in which it was revealed that there were huge security flaws discovered in the majority of today’s modern processors. This included both desktop and mobile-type processors. Companies like Microsoft and Linux announced that they had a fix in the works, while other companies such as Essential have since released a patch for the Essential Phone that should fix the problem.