Want to prevent hacking? Update your iPhone, iPad quickly, warns government

New Delhi: Apple released its latest iOS version for iPhone users earlier this week, allowing them to unlock their iPhone with Face ID while wearing a face mask. The government has now published an alert urging iPhone users to upgrade their devices as soon as possible in order to protect themselves against "several vulnerabilities discovered in Apple products."" The advice was issued on March 17 by the CERT-In, the country's computer emergency response organisation, and grades the severity as "high." "because of these several flaws.

According to the advisory, the vulnerabilities discovered in Apple products allow an attacker to obtain elevated privileges and execute arbitrary code on an affected user's iPhone, exposing personal information and circumventing security constraints on the targeted machine. According to the release, these vulnerabilities exist in Apple products due to memory initialisation issues, out-of-bounds read and write, memory corruption, type confusion, use after free, null pointer dereference, authentication, cookie management issue, validation issue in the handling of symlinks, permissions issue, buffer overflow, memory consumption issue, access issue, and user interface issue.

A remote attacker could take advantage of these flaws by convincing the victim to open a specially designed file or application. According to CERT-In, effective exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain elevated privilege and execute arbitrary code in a victim's Apple device, thus circumventing the security system in place.

The advisory also specified the Apple software versions that were vulnerable. These included iOS and iPad versions prior to iOS 15.4, WatchOS prior to 8.5, Apple tvOS prior to 15.4, Apple iTunes for Windows prior to 12.12.3, macOS prior to Monterey 12.3, Apple TV software prior to 7.9, Logic Pro X prior to 10.7.3, and Apple Xcode prior to 13.3.