Updated Monday, Mar 3 with new information from Apple. If youve ever used Find My on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, for instance, youll know its an effective way to know exactly where your stuff is (and it saved my vacation when I lost, and it found, my iPad in the south of France). First, a report warned of a vulnerability which could leave other Bluetooth devices exposed, and its now emerged that Apple has released a fix for the issue. More on this below, but Apple has said that there was not a vulnerability in its products, and that the company reacted at the end of last year to hardened the Find My network to resist this kind of behavior. .Apple iPhone and Find My. NurPhoto via Getty ImagesThe original report from George Mason University, picked up by MacRumors, claimed that hackers could use Find My to track devices without the owners knowledge.Called nRootTag, the exploit tricks the Find My network into treating ordinary Bluetooth devices as if they were AirTags, allowing hackers to turn laptops, smartphones, game controllers, VR headsets, and even e-bikes into unwitting tracking beacons, MacRumors explains.Its like transforming any laptop, phone, or even gaming console into an Apple AirTag - without the owner ever realizing it, according to Junming Chen, lead author of the study. As youll read below, this is only part of the story.Normally, the system works so that AirTags and other compatible items such as iPhones and iPads send Bluetooth signals to passing Apple devices, and relaying the data to Apple, which notifies the person whos reported the item lost.The researchers discovered they could manipulate cryptographic keys to make the network believe any Bluetooth device was a legitimate AirTag. The research team found that the attack has a 90% success rate and can pinpoint a device's location within minutes, the report says.It was even able to track a moving e-bike and reconstruct the flight path of a gaming console on an airplane.However, the good news is that its not easy to do. The attack does require fairly hefty computing resourcesthe research team used hundreds of graphics processing units to quickly find matching cryptographic keys, it says. However, it goes on in less comforting tones, they note that this could be achieved relatively inexpensively by renting GPUs, which has become a common practice in the crypto-mining community.It's now become clear that Apple has been on the case with preventing problems like this for months. What the report actually shows, Apple tells me, is that the George Mason team showed how attackers who successfully take control of a Linux, Windows or Android system can then further track the location of that device using the Apple Find My network.Apple products are not affected by the attack, but even so, the company hardened the Find My network to resist this kind of attack.And this hardening happened last year, back on Dec.11, 2024, when Apple released iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2. Apple went on to recognize and acknowledge the George Mason team for their report on the Apple Security Release page. This was under the proximity section of the page and Apple thanked them for furthering the understanding of potential issues with hacked devices on other platforms.