If you’re an Apple user or at least a fan of the brand and its products, then you know about iOS, their branded mobile operating system. And you also most likely know about the fall launch of iOS 11, the upcoming new installment in Apple’s famous line of operating systems. This launch has been announced ever since June 5, 2017 at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California. However, versions of iOS 10 are still running on most devices, and the newest one just dropped.
We’re talking about iOS 10.3.3, of course. The new version of iOS comes to iPhones 5 and newer, as well as fourth gen iPads and newer and sixth gen iPods. And while the update might seem small and irrelevant at first (in fact, many have reviewed as being a purely routine action), there is more than meets the eye in this case. If you take a quick look over the security bulleting that Apple has released following the rolling out of iOS 10.3.3, you will see that this new update is crucial and you should get it as soon as possible.
So, what is so important about iOS 10.3.3? Well, it patches a major and highly threatening security vulnerability that would have potentially allowed malicious third parties to gain control of your iPhone’s CPU. The vulnerability affects the devices’ Wi-Fi chips produced by Broadcom, namely the BCM 4354, 4358 and 4359 chips. These chips were very vulnerable to attacks due to a hack dubbed as Broadpwn, but now that’s all been taken care of.
There is still one problem at hand here. For one, older iPhones won’t get iOS 10.3.3, but still use these chips, so what will happen to them? But even more dangerous is the fact that there are a lot of Android devices in the same situation, and yet Google has not addressed the issue in updates thus far.