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Apple Releases 'Highly Critical' Patch
Toothpick writes "Apple Insider reports that a new security update is available for download from Apple. This addresses issues identified in sudo, Safari, and OpenSSL among others.
The gory details are, predictably, available on the Apple Info site." Commentary from ZDNet is also available.
Ummmmmm... when did Apple change their domain to "get.sent.to" ? Don't support someone with clickthrough advertising, just go directly to http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/
Look at the numbers. Whoever would have thought that the numbers for MS and Apple would have got this close?
Counting the number of bugfixes released is no measure a a system's security. The number of remote vulnerabilities on a default install of the OS, the ease of exploiting those vulnerabilities, the number of local exploits, and the likelihood of an exploit happening are all factors. Additionally, predictive criteria, like past performance and the exposure and design of the architecture may be useful. If you look at Windows it has innumerable unpatched local vulnerabilities and working exploits that have existed for many years. They don't even bother fixing them most of the time. OS X on the other hand has a handful of potential local priviledge escalations vulnerabilities, that are fixed in a timely manner, and with one or two proof of concept exploits (none unpatched). Windows has a number of long running remote vulnerabilities and they crop up every month. Exploits for these vulnerabilities occasionally appear before a fix is available for the vulnerability, and regularly appear before administrators have time to thoroughly test those fixes (which is very necessary due to the kludgy Windows architecture and their history of catastrophically broken patches). On OS X I am unaware of any remote vulnerability with a published exploit that preceded the fix for that vulnerability.
The ease of exploitation of vulnerabilities on Windows is much higher due to the lack of a usable non-admin environment, non-network services that run exposed on the network, default settings that run unneeded services, auto execution of scripts and executables within default and unremovable applications, ease of concealing the nature of an executable in the GUI, integration of web browsing and file browsing code, lack of packaging for executables, shared registry, and larger install base for automated propagation. OS X is by no means perfect and experiences regular security flaws. Much of the security auditing that is done, is a side benefit of the open source user environment components OS X shares with other UNIX-like systems. I'd be much happier if Apple did some more thorough security testing of their products. That said, to make the argument that the security of OS X is approaching the same level of complete cluster-fuckedness that is Windows based solely on counting the number of vulnerabilities patched by the respective vendors is ludicrous.