2 November

The system updates your phone receives include security fixes, and Apple's support pages for Taiwan and mainland China list keeping software up to date as one of the most important steps you can take to keep an Apple device secure. According to an analysis written afterwards by MIT researchers, from 2 November 1988 a program broke into computers on the internet, which then had about 60,000 hosts, and spread from one machine to the next. It exploited a debugging feature that the mail-handling program left on by default and a service for looking up user information that did not check the length of its input, and it guessed passwords from account names, simple variations of people's names and a word list built into the program. In the paper's account of the defences used at the time, removing the mail program's debug command and shutting down or fixing the lookup service each worked only once the other holes had been plugged as well. On an iPhone, turn on automatic installation under Settings > General > Software Update > Automatic Updates; Google's Android help page in Chinese said as of 1 November that most system updates and security patches install automatically, though timing varies by device, manufacturer and carrier, and older devices may not be able to run newer versions.