If you care about the security of your iPhone, go update right now

Macworld

New iOS and iPadOS updates don’t just add lots of new features to your iPhone. There are also updates to improve the security and reliability of your devices, and the latest release is no exception. There are 25 new security updates in iOS/iPadOS 26.2, and if you can’t or don’t want to update to iOS 26 yet, 20 of them are available in a separate iOS/iPadOS 18.7.3 release.

Of particular note are a pair of WebKit vulnerabilities where “processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to arbitrary code execution.” Apple says it is aware of a report that these bugs were used in a highly sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals, in a version of iOS prior to iOS 26. These are zero-day flaws, meaning they were previously unknown.

There are quite a few similar WebKit fixes in these releases, in which race conditions, buffer overflows, and other memory tricks could be used to run code on your iPhone after visiting specifically crafted malicious web content. There are many other frameworks and apps with important security fixes as well, including some commonly used apps:

App Store

Impact: An app may be able to access sensitive payment tokens

Description: A permissions issue was addressed with additional restrictions.

CVE-2025-46288: floeki, Zhongcheng Li from IES Red Team of ByteDance.

FaceTime

Impact: Password fields may be unintentionally revealed when remotely controlling a device over FaceTime

Description: This issue was addressed with improved state management.

CVE-2025-43542: Yiğit Ocak

Photos

Impact: Photos in the Hidden Photos Album may be viewed without authentication

Description: A configuration issue was addressed with additional restrictions.

CVE-2025-43428: an anonymous researcher, Michael Schmutzer of Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt

So if you’re on iOS 26, it’s best to update to iOS 26.2 as soon as possible. If you’re not on iOS 26 yet and don’t want to or can’t upgrade, be sure to grab iOS 18.7.3 instead. You can get either update by going to the Settings app, then General and Software Update.