Since vulnerabilities of any operating system or application are a hot topic in the IT world, the security patches released by different companies can't escape from being targeted by the public looking for more information, and today it's Apple's turn, obviously. Well, it seems the update we're talking about has been released yesterday, and I have to excuse myself for the delay, but I have just found out about it a few minutes ago.

Usually, a security update is released to fix certain flaws of the operating system, and their number is usually known, but this time, we're looking at a really funny situation. ZDNet says that this security update for Mac OS X fixes 31 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day Wi-Fi hijack flaw, BetaNews says there are 18 holes patched, while eWeek claims this "Mega-patch" from Apple takes care of 22 existing problems. Now, which one should we believe?

The good part is that the Wi-Fi security issue has been solved really quick, and "Apple confirmed that the issue is a heap buffer overflow existing in the AirPort wireless driver's handling of probe response frames.", says Ryan Naraine from eWeek. Four holes in the Apple Type Services have also been patched, and the most critical of them was a stack buffer overflow in font processing that was leaving the system exposed to certain code execution attacks.

If you are thinking that the security code execution bug from Finder which could lead to a hijack even if you were simply browsing a shared directory is still around, think again - it has been fixed!

Other holes in FTPd, OpenSSL, PHP, Perl and PPP have also been fixed, so if a 24MB download is not too large for you, get it now!