Why to update all your Apple devices now

Apr 3
2 min read

I don't know about you but it seems like my iPhone has been doing a lot of updates lately and rebooting itself overnight. The good news is that Apple figured out that this is starting to irritate people and is now using a new method of updating our devices called "Background Security Improvements." Now they can do updates on portions of your device silently in the background, all without needing a reboot.

Over the past 2 weeks they've been pushing out CVE-2026-20643 using this new background method to patch a really bad security hole. The patch fixes a weakness in the web browser engine that lets a malicious website step outside its safety boundaries, then see and interfere with other things you've done such as reading emails, mobile banking even watch activity from some of your Apps. Although Apple claims that they haven't seen the exploit active in the the wild, it's really hard to track these sort of things.

There very well could be malicious sites out there that a carefully crafted email could trick you into visiting on your phone, allowing a bad actor to spy on your activities.

Yikes.

The Takeaway

You'll want to make sure that "Background Security Improvements" are set to automatically install on your Apple devices. Here's how:

On iPhone and iPad: Go to Settings, then tap Privacy & Security.
On Mac: From the Apple menu, choose System Settings. Then click Privacy & Security.