CoreText Font Rendering Bug Leads To iOS, OS X Exploit

redkemper writes with this news from BGR.com (based on a report at Hacker News), excerpting: "Android might be targeted by hackers and malware far more often than Apple's iOS platform, but that doesn't mean devices like the iPhone and iPad are immune to threats. A post on a Russian website draws attention to a fairly serious vulnerability that allows nefarious users to remotely crash apps on iOS 6, or even render them unusable. The vulnerability is seemingly due to a bug in Apple's CoreText font rendering framework, and OS X Mountain Lion is affected as well."

Comments

Re:Who says?

[girlintraining]

"Android was targeted by an astonishing 79 percent of all smartphone malware that year... iOS was targeted by 0.7 percent of malware attacks."

Oh wow! That must mean iOS is much more secure! That's what I was supposed to say, right? Not maybe the iphone isn't very popular, and people aren't designing malware for it because they want to go for Fort Knox instead of a piggy bank.

Android:
79.3% marketshare.
80% of malware.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't need to explain this, but given that it seems I'm one of the few people left on Slashdot with any understanding of statistics, I'll make this simple: Your "secure" operating system's only only real security is that it's too small to matter. This is like saying "DOS has the lowest rate of new malware infections of any OS on the market!" Well yeah. Nobody uses DOS anymore. And in a few years, nobody will use iPhone anymore either... it fell 3% in marketshare in just the last three months. Even malware authors are abandoning it because it costs too much to develop for such a small rate of return.