On November 14 Apple released an update for its Mac OS X, patching 41 vulnerabilities at once. 15 of these vulnerabilities were critical since they were flagged as capable of "arbitrary code execution," or, in other words, these flaws could be exploited to compromise a Mac. The remainder fixes took care of bugs that could allow for system and application crashes, infecting the Mac's DNS cache, allowing malicious Web sites to perform drive-by downloads, or letting hackers steal information or observe the contents of a user's hard drive. 10 bugs were fixed in the Windows version of the Safari browser, but there was only one fix in relation to the newly introduced Leopard (iPhoto – an application bundled with the operating system).
"The majority of the bugs found in OS X and on the iPhone have dealt primarily with third-party applications shipped with Apple's operating systems. Typically, the third-party applications are open-source projects; examples represented here include BIND, bzip and Kerberos. It's good to see Apple put forth these fixes as many of these updates fix critical security flaws," commented Andrew Storms, nCircle Inc.'s director of security operations.
The updates can be downloaded in Apple's website.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Recently, while using Firefox, I got a warning about an attempted download of spyware/malware to my intel imac. At that point I hadn’t installed the update described here, although I did afterward. So, I’m not sure (a) whether there’s malware operating on the machine and (b) if there is, what I do to get rid of it.
I would appreciate any advice or other info.
Thanks.
David