Security News > 2021 > September > STILL ALIVE! iOS 12 gets 3 zero-day security patches – update now
If you've already listened to this week's Naked Security Podcast you'll know that we had finally concluded that iOS 12, the version before the version before the latest-and-greatest iOS 15, which arrived this Monday.
So when iOS 14 got updated in the last couple of patch cycles, but iOS 12 didn't, we couldn't tell whether it was still safe and didn't need the patches, whether it needed the patches but they'd be a bit late, or whether it needed the patches but would never get them.
We just received Apple's latest email security notification - ironically, delivered directly to our iPhone 6 running iOS 12.5.4 - to tell us about the latest security update, iOS 12.5.5.
Those bugs, as we can now see, were apparently not introduced via new features in the iOS 14 code, but were inherited by iOS 14 from iOS 13, which got them in turn from iOS 12.
Just as importantly, the iOS 12.5.5 update also fixes a THIRD zero day hole, this time in XNU, the open source heart of Apple's operating system kernel.
Until iOS 13 came out and split into two separate strains called iOS and iPadOS, the same update was used for Apple's phones and tablets.