There is a lot of attention being focused today on a flaw in Apple iMessages, which could allow an attacker to intercept your supposedly private messages and extract links to images and videos that you were trying to share securely with your contacts.
The security hole, discovered by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, is an important one to fix – and should be a good reason for you to update your iDevices to the newly-released iOS 9.3, which patches the problem.
However, it’s not the only security fix released by Apple today as you can see in the chart below.
Security updates
| Name and information link | Available for |
|---|---|
| OS X Server 5.1 | OS X Yosemite v10.10.5 and later |
| Safari 9.1 | OS X Mavericks v10.9.5, OS X Yosemite v10.10.5, OS X El Capitan v10.11 to v10.11.3 |
| OS X El Capitan v10.11.4 and Security Update 2016-002 | OS X Mavericks v10.9.5, OS X Yosemite v10.10.5, and OS X El Capitan v10.11 to v10.11.3 |
| Xcode 7.3 | OS X El Capitan v10.11 and later |
| tvOS 9.2 | Apple TV (4th generation) |
| watchOS 2.2 | Apple Watch Sport, Apple Watch, Apple Watch Edition, and Apple Watch Hermes |
| iOS 9.3 | iPhone 4s and later, iPod touch (5th generation) and later, iPad 2 and later |
Plenty of reasons to update everything from OS X to your Apple Watch to your Apple TV there…
And if you take the time to read through the advisories you discover that there are additional compelling reasons to update your iPhones and iPads than just the iMessages encryption flaw.
Take this newly-announced security hole, for instance:
FontParser
Available for: iPhone 4s and later, iPod touch (5th generation) and later, iPad 2 and later
Impact: Opening a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
Description: A memory corruption issue was addressed through improved memory handling.
CVE-ID
CVE-2016-1740 : HappilyCoded (ant4g0nist and r3dsm0k3) working with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI)
In short, an attacker could send you a boobytrapped PDF that would cause malicious code to run on your iPhone.
Nasty.
Update your Apple technology folks.
