Meltdown and Spectre, two hack attacks that showed perhaps the broadest vulnerability yet in global computing power, also affect Apple devices, the company said. The vulnerability is in processors that run the majority of computing devices and servers in the world. Apple wrote in a blog post:”All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time.” Apple said further that it has and will continue to provide “mitigations” against the vulnerabilities. “Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown. Apple Watch is not affected by Meltdown. In the coming days we plan to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre.”
The fixes that Apple has put in created concerns about performance slowdowns, especially since both Meltdown and Spectre attack a vulnerability in a process called “speculative execution” used to boost CPU performance. But Apple says those concerns aren’t valide. “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,”
