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Apple Pushes First Automated OS X Security Update

PC Magazine reports (as does Ars Technica) that Apple this week has pushed its first automated security update, to address critical flaws relating to Network Time Protocol: The flaws were revealed last week by the Department of Homeland Security and the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute—the latter of which identified a number of potentially affected vendors, including FreeBSD Project, NTP Project, OmniTI, and Watchguard Technologies, Inc. A number of versions of the NTP Project "allow attackers to overflow several buffers in a way that may allow malicious code to be executed," the Carnegie Mellon/DHS security bulletin said. ... The company's typical security patches come through Apple's regular software update system, and often require users to move through a series of steps before installing. This week's update, however, marks Cupertino's first implementation of its automated system, despite having introduced the function two years ago, Reuters said.

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  1. Re:Put restrict ... noquery in your ntp.conf file by hawkinspeter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I hadn't spotted the "restrict ... noquery" mitigation (which luckily I already had in place), but wouldn't servers still be susceptible to spoofed packets from one of the trusted servers?

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