Security Breach In MacOS!

Just when everything was looking fine - the iPhone waiting around the corner, iPod and MacBook sales rising, the Apple shares climbing higher and higher - something black appeared in the horizon. Its name: Denial of Service attacks.

I don't know about you, but I was thinking that the pleasure of being attacked using this weapon was reserved to Windows users. The guys from The French Security Incident Response Team proved I was wrong and published a report about another vulnerability of the Mac OS X operating system that allows local attackers to cause denial of service. "This flaw is due to an error in the "kevent()" [kern/kern_event.c] function when registering certain kernel events, which could be exploited by malicious local unprivileged users to panic a vulnerable sustem, creating a denial of service condition.", says this report.

This vulnerability popped up just after a previous security flaw emerged earlier this month; that one was related to a memory corruption error that allowed malicious users to crash the Web browser or gain complete control of your system. Compared to that, having a local user able to breach the system's security is not that worse, but it's not something to let you sleep well at night either...

While the affected products range is large, including Mac OS X 10.4.8 and all the prior releases, I wouldn't worry much about this, since the remote users can't attack our Macs yet, and if that would be possible, then we would really have a problem. If that time is going to arrive one day, you shouldn't have any worries at this time, and the only advice I can give you now is to enjoy your Macs and keep an eye on your local users!