Apple releases security patches for MacOS, iOS, iPadOS and WatchOS

Apple has today - Monday, 9/13/2021 - released what they describe as urgent security patches for products ranging from their computer operating system to their watch operating system.  The patches include MacOS 11.6, iOS 14.8, iPadOS 14.8 and WatchOS 7.6.2 .  A security update was also released for MacOS 10.15 (Catalina).

The security update addresses a vulnerability identified by Citizen Lab, a public cybersecurity group based in Canada.  Citizen Lab discovered that a Saudi activist's phone had been infected with Pegasus, a spyware product of NSO Group, an Israeli firm which provides cybersecurity services to the Israeli government.  The spyware was installed remotely through an exploit in iMessage using a  maliciously formatted PDF file to attack Apple's image rendering library.  The exploit is nicknamed ForcedEntry and can be used to execute arbitrary code.