For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. The company says its customers for such weaknesses are “government institutions (mainly from Europe and North America)”. The broker Zerodium, for instance, will pay “up to $500,000” for a security weakness that can be used to hack a user through Safari, and up to $2m for a fully developed piece of malware that can hack an iPhone without a user needing to click on anything.

Such weaknesses are hugely valuable on the open market, where cyberweapon brokers will buy them for hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars. Until the fix was released on Wednesday, the vulnerabilities will have been classed as “zero-day” bugs, because there has been a fix available for them for zero days. Those who should be particularly attentive to updating their software are “people who are in the public eye”, such as activists or journalists who might be the targets of sophisticated nation-state spying, Tobac said. Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security, said Apple’s explanation of the vulnerability meant a hacker could get “full admin access to the device” so that they can “execute any code as if they are you, the user”. It credited an anonymous researcher or researchers for disclosing both.Īnyone with an iPhone released since 2015, an iPad released since 2014 or a Mac running macOS Monterey can download the update by opening up the settings menu on their mobile device, or choosing “software update” on the “about this Mac” menu on their computer. The other affects WebKit, the underlying technology of the Safari web browser.įor each of the bugs, the company said it was “aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited,” though it provided no further details.

One of the software weaknesses affects the kernel, the deepest layer of the operating system that all the devices have in common, Apple said.

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