Update: After being silent on the issue for over 24 hours Apple finally acknowledged that Macs, iPads and iPhones are all vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre. The company said in an online support document that it has recently added security protections to MacOS and iOS designed to prevent any issues emerging from Meltdown, and is working to update Safari to prevent against another type of attack, dubbed Spectre. The Apple Watch is not affected, it said. Apple said there are no known exploits for the vulnerabilities and that the iOS and MacOS updates "resulted in no measurable reduction in the performance of macOS and iOS". There had been concerns that security patches dealing with Meltdown and Spectre will lead to severe performance degradation. The current updates to MacOS and iOS protect against Meltdown, but Apple said it will look to incorporate better protections against Spectre-type attacks in future updates to those operating systems. Earlier: Researchers have discovered three flaws in the design of every modern processor that could put millions of computing devices at the mercy of hackers. The first flaw named 'Meltdown' and the very similar second and third ones are called 'Spectre'. Those names sound alarming but are appropriate as the flaw affects to differing degrees every processor made by Intel, AMD and ARM. Since this is a hardware bug, everything running on affected processors is vulnerable including every major OS (Windows, Linux, and macOS), some mobile devices, and cloud computing providers. Meltdown was independently discovered by three groups—researchers from the…
