DoS Vulnerability

Sep 5, 2007 13:28 GMT  ·  By

A flaw has been disclosed within Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. This, if properly exploited, can cause a denial of service, but do not worry, the vendor has already released a patch to repair this issue! It will only affect firmware versions prior to 7.2.1, so just update and this will no longer be a problem for you!

As Secunia experts inform us, the security issue is caused due to an error within the processing of packets with IPv6 type 0 route headers. This can be exploited to cause a DoS due to high network traffic by sending specially crafted IPv6 packets to vulnerable systems.

How to repair this - well, just click these here. It will take you to the official Apple website, from where you can download the update. Also, you may check the original advisory here and here and do note that this will not affect the Gigabit Ethernet version of Extreme base Station with 802.11n as seen on Secunia.

For those of you who have read the article this far and are now wondering what the heck this Apple gizmo is, well, basically it's a router. With it, about 50 people can enjoy a wireless network offering up to five times the performance and up to twice the range of networks created with the earlier 802.11g standard. In case you are interested in this, you may read more about it here.

This has been ranked as moderately critical by security experts so please patch up if you don't want anyone to interfere and cause a crash. You never know when it's going to happen, maybe it's going to be in the day you need it most, so update now to avoid anything unpleasant!