For many years, the Apple iPhone has been considered one of the most secure smartphones available. But despite this reputation, security issues that might affect millions of users came to light last week, when researchers at Google revealed they had discovered websites that can infect iPhones, iPads, and iPods with dangerous software.
Simply visiting one of these websites is enough to infect your device with malicious software, allowing a high level of access to the device. Worryingly, it seems these vulnerabilities have been “in the wild” (that is, actively used by cyber-criminals) for around two years.
As there is no visible sign of infection on the device, it is likely users are completely unaware of the risks they’re facing.
The vulnerabilities being exploited are present on devices running recent (but not the most recent) versions of Apple’s iOS operating system—specifically, iOS 10 through to early versions of iOS 12. Every device running the vulnerable versions of iOS is a potential target for these websites.
Devices are infected via several methods, using 14 different security flaws—an unusual number of ways to compromise a device. Worse is that seven of the flaws involve Safari, the default web browser for many of these devices (and web browsing is a common activity for many users).
It’s not all bad news though. After Google reported the issues to Apple earlier this year, the vulnerabilities were promptly patched with the latest release of iOS (12.4.1).
Any user updating their device to the latest version of iOS should be protected against this attack. The easiest way to do it is to go to Settings ..
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