Apple: All iPhones, Macs, and iPads Are Affected by Meltdown and Spectre CPU Bugs

Apple has revealed that all of their Mac computers, iPads, and iPhones are vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU bugs recently discovered by Google.

In a recent statement, Apple has revealed that nearly all Apple computers, tablets, and phones have been affected by the recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre CPU bugs. Following the publishing of a report on the CPU bugs by Google, hardware manufacturers and software developers scrambled to detect and fix system vulnerabilities. Many tech firms have now released patches to bolster system security and mitigate the CPU bugs. For many years it was believed that Apple’s computer systems were much less vulnerable to hacking in comparison to Windows and Android systems, but it seems that Meltdown and Spectre have left every device running a modern computer processor vulnerable.

In a blog post, Apple commented on the issue saying, “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 such as the App Store. Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown.”

Apple further clarified their plans to update their devices to defend from the CPU bugs saying, “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.”

While all Apple devices are affected, Google has noted that their Android phones, which account for 80 percent of the global cell phone market, are protected from the exploit as long as users have installed the latest security updates. Microsoft has also released a number of updates in efforts to protect their users and has outlined steps that users should take to update their computers.