Apple’s new Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is an important advance in mobile security. By enforcing memory safety across the kernel and critical processes, MIE makes classic memory-corruption exploits (used in most mercenary spyware chains) far more complex to develop and deploy. This is a welcome step forward that will undoubtedly raise the cost for attackers.
But MIE addresses only one part of the threat landscape. Real-world attacks on mobile devices go far beyond memory corruption exploits such as buffer overflows and use-after-frees. Enterprises still need to contend with jailbreaks and privilege escalation/tampering, malicious or risky apps that exfiltrate sensitive data, and embedded SDKs that leak corporate or customer information without visibility. At the same time, phishing and social engineering campaigns directly target employees, while malicious shortcuts and configuration profiles silently override security controls. Persistent network-based threats — including rogue Wi-Fi, man-in-the-middle interception, and DNS manipulation — expose organizations to ongoing data leakage and regulatory non-compliance risks. None of these challenges are addressed by memory integrity protections alone, making comprehensive mobile threat defense a business-critical requirement to protect brand reputation, compliance posture, and sensitive assets.
Enterprises also rarely operate exclusively on the newest hardware. Mixed fleets of iPhones and iPads devices mean that many endpoints will not support MIE (the support is for iPhone 15 Pro+ and iPad models with M1 and later), leaving large segments of the estate exposed to traditional vectors. Even on the newest devices, MIE is preventative but passive: it does not detect, alert, or remediate in real time.
This is where mobile threat defense remains critical. Zimperium continuously monitors for jailbreaks, system compromise, phishing attempts, and network attacks, providing actionable intelligence to security teams and enforcing enterprise policies directly on the device. It delivers the visibility and control that operating system safeguards, no matter how advanced, were never designed to provide.
Apple has raised the bar against a significant class of exploits, and that is good news for everyone. But comprehensive security requires defense in depth. MIE makes exploitation harder; mobile threat defense ensures organizations remain protected across all attack surfaces—device, networks and phishing—while giving enterprises the real-time detection, response, and visibility they need.