A little over a week since the apparent leak of iPhone 14, Apple debuted the iPhone 13, Apple Watch Series 7 and more at their California Streaming event. In case you missed it, here’s everything you need to catch up on in less than 10 minutes.
Apple's iPhone 13 event in under 10 minutes pic.twitter.com/gceBvtXA5K
— Engadget (@engadget) September 15, 2021
The iPhone 13 was the big ticket item from the event, and it’s arrival sent social media into a frenzy. Since the event kicked off at 1 PM EDT yesterday to 12 PM today, iPhone 13 has generated 604,455 mentions across platforms. Twitter users dominated the conversation with 554,737 of the mentions. Using Sprinklr to run a sentiment analysis, we found that 59.7% of the conversation held positive sentiment. Similarly to past generations of the iPhone, emphasis was put on the camera and it’s updated capabilities. As you can see in the word cloud below, users were also drawn to the new colors, the size, display, and storage capacity of the new iPhone.
The iPhone 13 was not the only thing Apple announced yesterday however. With the new Apple Event also came iOS 14.8. This update came as a surprise to many as iOS 15 is scheduled to be release later this year. The reasoning behind the surprise update is concerning to say the least. iOS 14.8 is a security patch in response to researchers at Citizen Lab finding a spyware called Pegasus on an iPhone.
Pegasus was developed by Israel’s NSO group and is considered the Holy Grail of surveillance. The spyware allows users to use a zero-click information method to collect whatever they seek off of any device. In the past, people were typically prompted by spyware through links in either texts or emails, but Pegasus allows whoever is using the spyware to access a device’s camera, microphone, messages, emails, and calls without tipping off the owner. John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, warns that “This spyware can do everything an iPhone user can do on their device and more.”
Over the past 24 hours there have been over 10,500 mentions of the search terms “iOS AND update” on Twitter. Given the severity of this security breach, the researchers from Citizen Lab and Apple users are urging others to update to iOS 14.8 as quickly as possible.
Stop and UPDATE your iPhones to iOS 14.8 NOW!!! We @citizenlab recovered NSO Group's FORCEDENTRY zero-click exploit (CVE-2021-30860) from the phone of a Saudi activist, and shared w/ Apple, who released iOS 14.8 today with a fix. https://t.co/fg2rihR6xp
— Bill Marczak (@billmarczak) September 13, 2021
This is not a drill. 🚨
If you have an iPhone, install today's iOS 14.8 update to fix a zero-day zero-click vulnerability previously used to install spyware. pic.twitter.com/f2Ervr02tD
— BleepingComputer (@BleepinComputer) September 13, 2021
As one could imagine, this update did not bring as much joy to Apple users as the iPhone 13 announcement did. Ninety percent of posts contained negative sentiment from users.
This is convenient timing for Apple. The California Streaming event and release of the iPhone 13 will carry the bulk of the load of conversation involving Apple, but iOS 14.8 is a critical patch to a security risk that should not go unnoticed.
Author: Jacob Luksik
