GCHQ has discovered more than 20 vulnerabilities this year, including iOS vulnerabilities.

­(original title: GCHQ has discovered more than 20 vulnerabilities this year, including iOS vulnerabilities)

­earlier this week, British intelligence agency Government Communications headquarters (GCHQ) discovered a serious vulnerability in Firefox. Now, GCHQ says it has helped fix nearly 20 vulnerabilities in the past few months, including iOS. A spokesman for GCHQ told the media that so far, more than 20 vulnerabilities have been released by GCHQ / CESG in 2016, covering a number of software products. CESG (National Bureau of Information Security Technology) is the information security department of GCHQ.

­these vulnerabilities include kernel vulnerabilities in the latest version of S X El Captain v10.11.4, which will allow for arbitrary code execution, as well as two vulnerabilities in iOS 9.3, one of which will allow arbitrary code execution and the other may allow applications to launch denial of service attacks.

­GCHQ has also recently intervened in smart gas meters and smart electricity meters installed in the UK, planning to use encrypted signals to transmit data. 'developers sometimes don't thank us for helping them find vulnerabilities,'a GCHQ spokesman said. GCHQ Robert Hannigan said in a speech last year that GCHQ had found vulnerabilities in every major mobile and desktop platform, including big-name software used by British companies.

However, governments sometimes withhold the loopholes they have discovered so that they can exploit them to launch attacks. GCHQ declined to answer questions about whether GCHQ had selectively released the vulnerabilities they found.