Apple confirms it's affected by the big Google-discovered processor flaws, but it's already issued fixes

REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Apple CEO Tim Cook

• Apple confirmed Thursday its devices are affected by the same processor security flaw Google discovered and was made public this week.
• The company has already issued patches in the latest versions of its MacOS, iOS, and tvOS operating systems.
• Apple says the fixes don't affect the performance of its devices.
  

Apple on Thursday publicly commented for the first time on "Meltdown" and "Spectre" - the Google-discovered attacks that exploit a security flaw that affects almost everything with a processor, and that can reveal sensitive information like passwords or photos.

"All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time," writes Apple in its blog entry.

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However, Apple says that it's already taken action: iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 all contain fixes meant to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerabilities. All of those updates are already out there in the wild, so if you own any of those devices, make sure your operating system is up-to-date.

"Our testing with public benchmarks has shown that the changes in the December 2017 updates resulted in no measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS," according to common benchmarks, says Apple.

That's a reference to the concerns held by some cybersecurity researchers who believe that the fix for the "Meltdown" and "Spectre" attacks would require affected systems to take a hit to their performance. However, earlier on Thursday, Amazon and Google both reported that they, too, found the worries around lowered performance to be overblown.

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