Apple Inc. (AAPL) sure can move fast when it wants to, especially when the security of millions of iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads potentially hangs in the balance.
The company released an update to its iOS operating system this afternoon to address a dangerous security hole that was exposed by a new jailbreak process earlier this month.
The new jailbreak approach exploited a hole in Apple’s PDF-viewing engine and, by extension, alerted Apple to a significant problem with its proprietary PDF rendering engine. While Apple routinely rolls out updates to its iOS to address problems and introduce new features, it appears to address jailbreaking much more urgently.
The newest iOS 4.0.2 is the second update to be released by Apple in as many months. The first update addressed an issue that Apple claimed to have discovered while investigating problems with the antenna design on the iPhone 4. Before that update, Apple’s mobile devices were indicating a signal strength much greater than they were actually receiving.
The latest update is equally limited in scope. It only address the PDF security problem, or as Apple put it, the update “fixes security vulnerability associated with viewing malicious PDF files.”
Finally, in other iPhone-related news, The Next Web reports that the long-delayed white iPhone 4 won’t be making an appearance in the United Kingdom until the end of the year. When Steve Jobs addressed the white iPhone delays during a press conference last month, he said the lighter-colored variant of the device would be shipping by the end of July. But barely a week later, Apple announced that the white models were being delayed once again, this time with an ambiguous target date of “later this year.”