Your iPhones, iPads and MacBooks are ‘vulnerable to hackers’

All iPhones, iPads and Mac computers are affected by Meltdown and Spectre bugs, Apple has told users of its devices.

Meltdown and Spectre are major security flaws that leaves the devices vulnerable to hacking.

The microchip flaw affects device running the company’s iOS and macOS operating systems, as well as the Apple TV.

“All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected,” Apple said on Thursday night.

The statement read: “Apple has also confirmed that the two vulnerabilities affect all Mac and iOS devices. The company’s full statement, available through a new support document covering Meltdown and Spectre, is below: 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 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 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’s statement does not make it clear if these vulnerabilities have been addressed in older versions of iOS and Mac, but for Macs, there were security updates for older versions of macOS released alongside macOS 10.13.2, so it’s possible fixes are already available for Sierra and El Capitan.”

Spectre and Meltdown are serious vulnerabilities that take advantage of the speculative execution mechanism of a CPU.