Apple Releases iOS 17.6 and macOS 14.6 with Security Patches

This week, Apple rolled out updates addressing vulnerabilities in its iOS and macOS operating systems. In total, developers patched 35 security flaws in the mobile OS and another 70 in the desktop version.

With the release of iOS 17.6 and iPadOS 17.6, users are now protected from authentication bypasses, unexpected app and system crashes, information disclosure bugs, denial-of-service (DoS) issues, and memory leaks.

Apple has implemented stricter restrictions and improved validation checks to better safeguard the data of its device owners.

Several of the fixed vulnerabilities were found in third-party components used in iOS, such as the libtiff library and the open-source graphics engine ANGLE, among others.

Most of the new patches have also been backported to older OS versions—specifically, iOS 16.7.9 and iPadOS 16.7.9.

macOS Sonoma 14.6 and Other Updates

For macOS, developers released Sonoma version 14.6, which addresses nearly 70 vulnerabilities. Previous versions—macOS Ventura and macOS Monterey—received patches for more than 40 security holes.

Third-party components were also a source of vulnerabilities on macOS. For example, security issues were found in Apache HTTP Server, curl, libtiff, OpenSSH, and ANGLE.

Safari, with the release of version 17.6, received patches for nine bugs, eight of which affected the WebKit browser engine. More details about these updates can be found in Apple’s official security advisory.