Welcome to Brown’s Bytes! Your weekly insight from Mobliciti’s CTO Andy Brown. Follow #brownsbytes
2nd September 2022
Interesting one this week…
Apple has quietly rolled out another security update for iOS. What makes this interesting is that it’s for older devices.
Effectively this is a patch for the same vulnerability I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but crucially this time the patch is for devices which cannot run iOS 15.
Things like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch 6th generation… remember the iPod Touch, anyone!!??
It raises a number of interesting points for me:
- There are still loads of these older devices out there – and they’re running unpatched
- Apple clearly has seen a significant risk from all this
- This exploit has potentially been knocking around for a long time given how far back iOS 12 goes
This isn’t unprecedented. Apple patched iOS 12 for security fixes last year also. And Microsoft patched Windows XP after they’d officially killed it off in the past as well.
I guess this ultimately shows the risk to a software/hardware vendor from ending support for something that people still want to use. Old smartphones are an obvious case in point, but the same is increasingly true of all the ‘smart’ kit we have in our lives (even our cars). Just because you stop patching doesn’t mean people stop using it!
Apple has patched this because they needed to, probably to protect their brand more than anything else.
Clearly, if your fleet is running any of these devices, make sure you get them updated now! Oh – and replace them!!
Again, if you need help updating older devices or even replacing them, get in touch.
