Less than 24 hours after developer Lemi Orhan Ergin discovered a critical bug in macOS High Sierra that made it far too easy for anyone to gain root access to your Mac, Apple has responded by issuing a fix while apologizing for the concern it has caused to customers.
The company provided the following message to the press:
Security is a top priority for every Apple product and regrettably we stumbled with this release of macOS.
When our security engineers became aware of the issue Tuesday afternoon, we immediately began working on an update that closes this security hole.
This morning, as of 8:00 am, the update is available for download and starting later today it will be automatically installed on all systems running the latest version (10.13.1) of macOS High Sierra.
We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users, both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused. Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development process to help prevent this from happening again.
Apple is definitely not known for issuing public apologies often.
Craig Federighi is in charge of software engineering at Apple and this crack in the firm’s development process is entirely on him because he oversees the teams that develop iOS, macOS and Siri software. Here’s hoping that they learn from this unnecessary mistake so that dumb things like this never fly under Apple’s radar again.