These bulletins are useful for the purposes of completeness, but would have been more useful still if they had been published when the original updates came out. As well as announcing and documenting the abovementioned 8.1 and 15.1 versions for watchOS, tvOS, iOS and iPadOS, three bulletins provide “catchup” documentation for the previous updates numbered watchOS 8 and tvOS/iOS/iPadOS 15.
Old and now superseded updates get updated update notes.The 15.0.2 update appeared more than two weeks ago, and closed a zero-day kernel code execution vulnerability dubbed CVE-2021-30883.
Importantly, these updates retrofit the iOS 15.0.2 patch to the Watch and TV product lines. WatchOS goes to 8.1, while tvOS matches with the iOS and iPadOS version number, and gets 15.1.
The Big Sur and Catalina strains of macOS are patched.Presumably some of the iOS 15 bugs are unique to new code added for feature purposes. For those who haven’t moved or won’t be moving from iOS 14 to iOS 15, there’s version 14.8.1, fixing a smaller number of bugs than the iOS 15 update. The previous iOS 14 flavour gets updated as well.Both iOS and iPadOS make a simultaneous jump to version 15.1, fixing many of the same bugs mentioned for macOS 12.0.1, including potential kernel-mode code execution exploits, as loved by jailbreakers, surveillance software makers and cybercriminals alike. Phones and tablets get related updates.15 of these were of the “malicious application may be able to execute arbitrary code” sort, with 9 of those bugs dealing with code execution bugs in the kernel itself. We’re assuming that the security patches in the otherwise brand-new Monterey release are listed for the benefit of anyone who’s been using the Beta version, because there are 37 listed fixes covering everything from AppKit to zsh. The latest macOS 12 Monterey emerges as 12.0.1.First thing this morning, just after midnight, we received the latest slew of Apple Security Bulletins by email.Īs often seems to happen with Cupertino’s patches, the emails were informative and confusing in equal measure, offering an intriguing mix of security update information: