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Huge security hole in Internet Explorer for MacOS
Brad Lucier writes "Macintouch
is reporting
(go down the page a bit)
that Internet Explorer 5.1, which comes preinstalled on MacOS X 10.1,
has a huge security hole---when it downloads arbitrary programs encoded
in the Macintosh's standard BinHex (.hqx) format, it automatically
executes them. " Well I guess thats one way to make Unix insecure. Can anyone actually confirm this since it looks kinda sketchy. I wonder what someone's rationale would be for that:"Oh this won't hurt anyone, and saving that extra 'OK' click will be great!".
Most users don't care so much about the system files, which are just a matter of rerunning the install process. Their personal data is far more valuable to them.
Maybe this will save a little data on systems with multiple users, but we're talking about personal computers here. By definition they are primarily used by one person.
The protection offered by an administrator account is minimal.
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
Didn't anyone see this coming?? I can't belive Apple would allow such a dumb "feature".
I do have one question, though... being a Unix-derrived OS, does the average user on a Mac OS X system have sufficent privlages to destroy anything outside of his home directory?
Oh! Mod this up! He spelled MS with a $!!!
Wow, it's nice that Mac users can now enjoy the ease of use and power of Microsoft programs. I wonder if they'll want to switch to a Wintel machine after this one bites them in the ass!
Well I guess thats one way to make Unix insecure.
That.. and it's 10 plus year running history of remotely exploitable buffer overflows. But yeah.