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Apple Issues Patches For 25 Security Holes
TheCybernator writes "Apple today released software updates to plug more than two dozen security holes in its Mac OS X operating system and other software. The free patches are available via the Mac's built-in Software Update feature or directly from Apple's Web site.
All told, today's batch fixes some 25 distinct security vulnerabilities, including a dangerous flaw present in the AirPort wireless devices built into a number of Apple computers, including the eMac, the iBook, iMac, Powerbook G3 and G4, and the Power Mac G4. Apple said computers with its AirPort Extreme wireless cards are not affected.
Earlier this month, Apple released a software update to fix a vulnerability in its wireless router, the AirPort Extreme Base Station. That update and instructions on how to apply it are available at the link."
The remote attacks seem to be coming out of the Kerebros admin daemon distributed by MIT 3 holes. One hole each in libinfo, portmap, ichat.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As an Apple 'outsider' I'm not certain why this is news.
Is it because these issues/vulnerabilities have been outstanding for a long time? Or perhaps Apple does not patch things often?
It's an honest question, my Ubuntu systems at home have frequent patches rolled out and the staff at work are always talking about another update on their Windows desktops.
Isn't Apple the same?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Apple is providing some patches for 10.3.9 as well. Good to see that they are still providing security related updates for the previous system.
I think you have totally misunderstood what that tag means. It means that the designer specifically designed the device to not do something that is normally expected or wanted, or has been designed in such a way as to annoy the user constantly. In other words, they had to work harder to make sure the device did not work. Typical MS things that are defective by design are DRM, Clippy, and that new security thing in Vista that is so annoying.
These were bugs, not by design. Apple didn't not specifically intend for them to exist, and has now fixed them.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
One thing to note: the one bug that Secunia is rating as "moderately critical" is on FTP, and it is not enabled by default.
And yet none of those remotely-vulnerable services are enabled by default. Indeed, of the three, two of them wouldn't get switched on by the vast majority of Mac users.
.ANI vulnerability.
Which is somewhat different to, say, the
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=173
So I wonder if this invalidates the contest. This just revealed vulns that aren't patched on the contest machines.
It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost no (or none? The point is I've never come across one) viruses or worms.
Back in the '80s and early '90s the Mac was a fertile breeding ground for viruses, because of the design of the system. Just putting a floppy in the drive was enough to run code. Apple's response to this was to get rid of automatic execution of code fragments on floppies and in resource forks of documents. This was a normal and sane response to a bad design.
If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus.
While the fact that there are more Windows boxes out there, there are several features of Windows that are insecure-by-design that have had a huge impact on Windows security. In particular, the design of Internet Explorer and the integration of the HTML control into the desktop and email programs had an enormous and direct effect on the spread of viruses and worms on Windows machines all out of proportion to their popularity.
Before the release of "Open Desktop", the virus problem on Windows really was managable without antivirus software. Just following good software hygiene was enough to make viruses a rare problem. Afterwards, I found that simply not allowing the use of IE and Outlook and other components that used the HTML control to display untrusted documents was more effective than antivirus software, because it removed the mosty common point of entry of new viruses.
The sane response to this would have been to back out the desktop-browser integration and redesign the system so that the right to run unsandboxed code was SOLELY mediated by the application displaying the document. Microsoft, instead, attempted to come up with tighter and tighter heuristics as to when to allow documents out of the sandbox, which boggled my mind then and still boggles my mind now.
There are other problems in the design of Windows that I've discussed before, but this one should be more than enough to make my point, especially after you handed me such a great counterexample.