Apple releases Meltdown patches for macOS Sierra and El Capitan

Apple has released patches for the Meltdown vulnerability on older versions of its operating system, more specifically Sierra and El Capitan. For High Sierra, the company had previously released a patch for the vulnerability.

The patch is present in version 10.12.6 of macOS Sierra and in version 10.11.16 of OS X El Capitan, Apple reports in a message. This fixes the bug that almost exclusively affects Intel processors for these operating systems, protecting them from reading kernel memory by software that shouldn’t be able to.

The release of the patches follows previous releases from Apple, for example, on January 5, it already released a Meltdown patch for macOS High Sierra in version 10.13.1 of the operating system. For the two Specter variants, Apple has released mitigations for Safari and WebKit on iOS. The company did that on January 8 in version 11.2.2 of its mobile OS.

Intel recently warned against installing its previous patches for the second variant of Specter, or CVE-2017-5715, as they could lead to reboot issues. The company is working with its partners on a patch that will not contain these flaws.