Following the discovery of a fundamental design flaw in Intel’s processor chips which has now been revealed to affect Apple devices, IT security experts commented below.
David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab:
“Historically, cybercriminals have focused their attack efforts on devices running Windows, as they’re more commonly used and therefore provide a bigger pool of potential victims. As a result, Apple products have (wrongly) long been considered to be ‘hack-proof’, resulting in people being complacent about cyber-security protection for their Apple devices. However, this latest news shows that it’s not just Windows devices that are at risk – and demonstrates that Apple customers, and in fact anyone using any kind of digital device, need to be aware and take additional steps to ensure they’re keeping their devices as protected as possible.”
Joseph Carson, Chief Security Scientist at Thycotic:
“Another big blow for Apple with most iPhone and Macs at risk from Spectre chip security flaw, shortly after a major issue with Apple being neglectful to their customers with knowingly degrading performance on older devices supposedly due to battery issues. Now those devices will be affected with further degrading performance with this CPU security fix allegedly having up to a 30% impact on performance.
This begs the question, will older Apple devices even function? This will be a big issue for Apple who knowingly abandon customers who use older devices forcing them to upgrade to the latest models, will Apple step up and honour fixing all devices affected by this major CPU security flaw?”
