Worm Threat Forces Apple To Disable Software?

SkiifGeek writes "After the debacle that surrounded the announcement and non-disclosure of a worm that targets OS X, the vulnerability in mDNSResponder may have forced Apple to remove support for certain mDNSResponder capabilities with the recently released Security Update 2007-007. 'Seeming to closely follow the information disclosed by InfoSec Sellout, Apple's mDNSResponder update addresses a vulnerability that can be exploited by an attacker on the local network to gain a denial of service or arbitrary code execution condition. Apple goes on to identify that the vulnerability that they are addressing exists within the support for UPnP IGD... and that an attacker can exploit the vulnerability through simply sending a crafted network packet across the network. With the crafted network packet triggering a buffer overflow, it passes control of the vulnerable system to the attacker. Rather than patching the vulnerability and retaining the capability, Apple has completely disabled support for UPnP IGD (though there is no information about whether it is only a temporary disablement until vulnerabilities can be addressed).'"

Comments

*Pulls out a plate 'o crow*

[Anonymous Coward]

Come here Apple fanboys-and-girls. Lunch is served.

News at 11...

[maztuhblastah]

Researchers find hole, act like 1337 733ns about it. Company can't be sure that they've fixed hole, so they temporarily disable the reportedly-vulnerable function.

Yawn.

Re:News at 11...

[gutter]

Hello, Artie McStrawman! Sure, there are a few idiots out there that believe that OS X is infallible - there are also some idiots out there that believe the same about windows or linux. However, you aren't likely to find them around here. You'll find plenty of people that believe that OS X is MORE secure than the some of the alternatives, largely because their heavy use of open source and their default configuration that ships with no open ports, but very few that think it is "inherently secure".

The proof is in the number of successful worms and viruses for OS X, which depending on how you define them, hover right around zero. Yes, some of this is likely because of market share, but there's plenty of bragging rights associated with creating the first large-scale OS X compromise, so I wouldn't expect to see none. And of course, even if the relatively low number of security issues is because of market share, it doesn't make it any less pleasant for those of us who use OS X, especially since I'm not expecting it's share to go over 15-20%.

Anyway, if I accept your statement that OS X isn't perfect, will you stop bitching about smug mac users every time there is a discussion marginally related to Apple?

Thanks,
gutter

Apple ... Worm

[zariok]

So an "apple" is threatened by a "worm"... you don't say.

Sensationalism by Zonk

[Night Goat]

Hey Zonk, how about using more reputable sources than one guy's blog for your links? I know they were picked by the submitter, but linking only to a blog and then putting a question mark after the headline is sketchy. I can't put much faith in the article if I can't be sure that it's not just a blogger talking out of his ass.

Apple did the right thing

[mcrbids]

Yes, I understand that there are certainly dissenting opinions here. But (IMHO) the thing that most Slash-bots complain about is that Microsoft will

A) Pick a feature that's dumb. (like embed a scripting language into an image format, or give a spreadsheet scripting language access to the filesystem)

B) Choose to preserve the dumb feature in spite of known security problems.

C) Treat the resulting backlash as a "PR issue" rather than a technical one.

D) Sometimes, if the backlash gets bad enough, they'll hack in security restrictions in response to specific known implementations that take advantage of the vulnerability rather than fix the vulnerability. EG: fixes that look for a XXX worm trace, rather than fix the thing that XXX worm exploits. (See anti-virus)

Apple is doing the right thing, here, folks! It may or may not be that the feature mentioned is analogous to (A) above. Either way, Apple is chosing security over features, even though features are important.