Security researchers have recently uncovered security issues known by two names, Meltdown and Spectre. These issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all computing devices and operating systems. All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time. Since exploiting many of these issues requires a malicious app to be loaded on your Mac or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources such as the App Store. 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. We continue to develop and test further mitigations for these issues and will release them in upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
Everything you need to know is on Apple’s web site.
I hope El Capitan is still covered for these updates.
Apple really does a poor job of communicating what is affected and what will and what will not be patched.
Apple should patch back to 10.9, if those “systems” are affected. It is not the users fault Apple releases a semi major OS update every year…
How far back do you believe Apple should maintain active support for?
Apple really needs to move faster on the press side. The story could have been “Each vendor has announced patches” and Apple could have been known to already ship them. Instead, by opting out of that first round of press Apple now gets a round of “All Macintosh and iPhones are vulnerable!… Oh, and Apple already released the patches.”
I agree, but remember, bad press is still press time and by doing it this convoluted way, they get much more attention. But yes, you point stands, by coming out initially and simply stating that mitigation is already in place of X and Y and that Z is in the works. I guess is that bad press is not necessarily bad in all instances.