Update your iPhone now: Hackers can easily hijack your phone using JPEGs and PDF files

Do you have an iPhone? Then you need to update to iOS 10.1 as soon as possible in order to prevent hackers from easily hijacking your device by tricking you into clicking on malicious files.

Yeah, it probably seems a drag to have to keep updating your iPhone so frequently, and everyone gets lazy sometimes. Plus, if you've been keeping up with the news, you probably already updated it in August/ September to patch against a serious security flaw enabling the first ever remote attack to succeed in installing malware on the iPhone.

Whatever it is, stop being lazy and update your iPhone, because this latest patch is crucial. It prevents a truly nasty security flaw, known as CVE-2016-4673, whereby attackers can hijack your iPhone, iPad or iPod simply by tricking you into looking at a malicious JPEG image or opening a malicious PDF or font file, either in an email, or on a website.

The malicious files remotely execute malicious code on your phone's operating system which enables hackers to take over your device and use it to access your apps and look at your data, among other things.

But it's not just that – iOS 10.1 also includes patches for 11 other critical security vulnerabilities, including a bug that enables apps to pull details from your Address Book even if access to it has been revoked; a remote code execution flaw in the web browser engine WebKit; and a vulnerability that enables attackers to remotely eavesdrop on FaceTime conversations.

And if you own any other Apple products besides an iPhone, you should probably take the time and update them too, as new patches have been released to fix eight critical security flaws on the Apple Watch, 10 nasty bugs on the Apple TV and 16 security flaws affected macOS Sierra.

The easiest way to update your iOS device is to go to Settings > General > Software Update, though you can also plug your device into your computer, access the iTunes Store and download the software to update at a more convenient time. Just be sure to make it soon.