Apple has been left feeling ever-so-slightly red faced after posting a security update to address the Heartbleed vulnerability in its AirPort router hardware. This comes after the company previously stated that all of its products are immune to the bug in OpenSSL.

Apple’s AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule home network appliances have both been given a firmware update to fix problems caused by CVE-2014-0160 which could allow hackers to steal customer’s data. This flaw, which allows attackers to extract in-memory data from servers they target, has sent a chill through the web’s security community. Heartbleed is said to be extremely prevalent, affecting two out of three of the world’s websites, as well as numerous types of hardware and networking equipment. Indeed, so severe is the flaw that some experts have said it could take months to be fixed.

In the case of Apple, the flaw is only thought to affect its AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule 802.11ac models, which are the most recent versions. The company says that an attacker could exploit the flaw to gain network access privileges, allowing them to access data from the Send Diagnostics or Back to My Mac tools. It adds that older versions of its products are not affected by Heartbleed.

Apple is asking customer to use the AirPort Utility management tool to install Firmware Update 7.7.3 immediately.

As for the rest of its products, Apple continues to insist these are safe. IOS and OS X devices all use an implementation of SSL/TLS that doesn’t rely on vulnerable code from OpenSSL, although that doesn’t mean fanbois should drop their guard completely. Recently, Apple’s products were found to be subject to a potentially serious “goto fail” flaw in SSL, while it’s also just patched the “triple handshake” issue that affected both OS X and iOS.

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