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Ancient Flaws May Leave Mac OS X Vulnerable

Posted by Zonk on from the patch-to-the-left-patch-to-the-right dept.

mdeb writes "ZDNet Australia is running a story that claims Mac OS X 'contains unpatched security flaws of a type that were fixed on alternative operating systems more than a decade ago.' As an example, in August of last year, Apple patched the 'dsidentity' bug, which could easily have been exploited to grant a non-privileged user with admin rights the capability to create and remove 'root' user accounts."

1 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. There are bigger problems with OSX by argent · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are bigger problems in OSX. Auto-installing Dashboard widgets was stupid, and "Open Safe Files After Downloading" (a silly name for "Open Potentially Unsafe Files After Downloading") is an unnecessary risk only minimally mitigated by adding warning dialogs... but at least you can turn it off. More details in these comments:

    http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/io/osx-security.h tml
    http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/io/apple.html
    http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/io/apple2.html

    Thankfully even these are not as easily exploited as Microsoft's poisoned gumbo of IE, Outlook, ActiveX, and Security Zones... but Apple really needs to take a good look at the way they approach the Internet, and quit being so trusting.