The IT Nerd

You might recall that I’ve recently written about a pair of security issues that exist in iOS, and that came to light in the last couple of weeks. Here’s a quick recap:

• There is a Messages bug that can cause your iDevice to crash that popped up and is actively being exploited by jerks with nothing better to do.
• There is also a zero day iOS Mail exploit that is allegedly being exploited widely. 

Once these security issues were made public, Apple promised that an emergency patch would be released last week to address the Messages bug at the very least. But that didn’t happen. And there was no comment from Apple in regards to that. Not that I am shocked by that as Apple isn’t the type of company that displays transparency.

But I do have an update on this that may partially explain this situation. YouTube tech content creator Aaron Zollo posted a video yesterday commenting on the new features of iOS 13.5 Beta 4. The interesting part of the video is 3:00 into the video below where it is confirmed via an email to one of Zollo’s followers from Craig Federighi who is the SVP of Software Engineering at Apple that the Messages bug is fixed.

That’s nice. but there’s no word on if the Apple Mail exploit is fixed. But at least something will eventually be released to fix the Messages issue.

Here’s the problem with this. The optics of this suck. It makes Apple look like it doesn’t take security of its users seriously. And that leaves their users wide open to bad stuff potentially happening to them. As well as leaving a bad taste in their users mouths. Take this person who left a comment on this blog post:

And the fact that this is the same company that makes a $1000 USD monitor stand, or wheels for a computer that cost $700 USD doesn’t help matters. The fact is that Apple isn’t doing itself any favors by not being open and upfront about these issues. They as a company need to be far more transparent when it comes to stuff like this, otherwise they’ll have lots of frustrated customers like the one above who will decide not to buy their products. And if that happens en masse, I would not want to be Tim Cook trying to explain that to Apple shareholders.

This entry was posted on May 7, 2020 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.