Apple Vulnerability found, company fixes the ‘Darwin Nuke’ forcing iPhones, iPads, and Macs to crash

By Staff Writer

Apr 21 2015, 10:06 AM EDT

Researchers at the Kaspersky Lab recently discovered the "Darwin Nuke" vulnerability that has the potential to crash the systems of Mac and iPhone devices. To solve this, it was recommended to update into latest OS releases. Though the latest iOS 8.3 has the Bluetooth connectivity problem, device owners can address this by forgetting the Bluetooth device and try pairing again, rebooting the iPhone or iPad, and others.

The analysis from the Kaspersky Lab revealed that devices affected by the "Darwin Nuke" vulnerability included 64-bit processors and iOS 8-run devices, such as iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 2, and iPad mini 3. The vulnerability will make such Apple devices exposed to remotely-activated denial of service (DoS) attacks, which can harm or damage the user's device and impact any corporate network connections. Once the attackers send an incorrect network packet to the target, the system will then process the invalid network packet, resulting to a system crash.

Daily News and Analysis cited Senior Malware Analyst at Kaspersky Lab Anton Ivanov saying, "At first sight, it is very hard to exploit this bug, as the conditions attackers need to meet are not trivial ones. But persistent cybercriminals can do so, breaking down devices or even affecting the activity of corporate networks. Routers and firewalls would usually drop incorrect packets with invalid option sizes, but we discovered several combinations of incorrect IP options that are able to pass through the Internet routers. We'd like to warn all OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 users to update devices to OS X 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3 releases."

Further, Apple patched the vulnerability in the release of OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3. In total, Apple addressed 80 vulnerabilities in the Yosemite, and three dozen code execution and privilege escalation vulnerabilities in iOS.

"The only way to safeguard your computer from this vulnerability is to upgrade to OS X 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3 software releases which you can download using Apple's software update," concludes Daily News and Analysis

However, the latest iOS 8.3 is not perfect since its release. There were issues and bugs found similar in the past iOS update, such as the Bluetooth connectivity problems. The problem affected connectivity with Bluetooth-based car stereos, and earphones and speakers connected to iOS devices.

To fix the Bluetooth connectivity problem, users are advised to try the following: