Apple rushed on Friday to release a patch to repair an iPhone software flaw that makes the smartphone vulnerable to hackers delivering covert attacks, the company said.

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“There’s a real urgency for people to update their iPhones because of this wave of publicity. The race is on between those fixing the vulnerability and attackers seeking to exploit the issue,” said Joris Evers, a McAfee spokesman.

According to reports, the SMS vulnerability allowed malicious parties to send text messages to an iPhone in order to gain access to various function of the device. Apple has then issued a software fix (3.0.1) after the vulnerability was exposed at last week’s Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

According to Apple’s security note, the glitch was a memory corruption issue that exists in the decoding of SMS messages.

“Receiving a maliciously crafted SMS message may lead to an unexpected service interruption or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved error handling. Credit to Charlie Miller of Independent Security Evaluators, and Collin Mulliner of Technical University Berlin for reporting this issue,” says the report.

iPhone users are advised to update their software to the latest version 3.0.1 to fix the said vulnerability.