All Mac and iOS devices are affected by Meltdown and Spectre bugs

Apple isn't immune to Meltdown and Spectre bugs that took the technology world by surprise on Wednesday. In an official statement, the company said that “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.”

For some devices, updates were released a while ago: “Apple released mitigations for Meltdown in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2.” Apple Watch is safe, since Meltdown is a problem with Intel processors and it doesn’t have any. Although reports have warned of performance hits, Apple says it has observed “no measurable reduction” in benchmark scores.

The company says it plans to issue patches for Safari on macOS and iOS to better help devices defend against Spectre, which is more easily exploitable and affects devices using chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM.

Researchers recently found a major security flaw in processors that affects almost every Intel, AMD and ARM chipset as well as the devices and operating systems running on them.

The direct fall out of the vulnerability are ‘Meltdown‘ and ‘Spectre‘- two new ways for hackers to attack these processors. “These hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which currently processed on the computer,” researchers say. “While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs.”