Apple Issues Patches For 25 Security Holes

TheCybernator writes "Apple today released software updates to plug more than two dozen security holes in its Mac OS X operating system and other software. The free patches are available via the Mac's built-in Software Update feature or directly from Apple's Web site. All told, today's batch fixes some 25 distinct security vulnerabilities, including a dangerous flaw present in the AirPort wireless devices built into a number of Apple computers, including the eMac, the iBook, iMac, Powerbook G3 and G4, and the Power Mac G4. Apple said computers with its AirPort Extreme wireless cards are not affected. Earlier this month, Apple released a software update to fix a vulnerability in its wireless router, the AirPort Extreme Base Station. That update and instructions on how to apply it are available at the link."

cue doodly piano music

Mac: Hi, I'm a mac!

PC: And I'm a PC.

Mac: Steve Jobs just plugged up all my holes

PC: GOODNIGHT! (tapdances off stage)

Re:cue doodly piano music

My own take on one of those ads is the upgrade ad...

First day, Mac approaches PC wearing hospital smock

Mac: What's with the smock PC?
PC: I have to upgrade for Vista. I'm a bit scared
Mac: Okay, be cool. I'll send you flowers in the hospital.

Next day: Robust looking PC stands there smiling while Mac runs up in panic.

Mac: Hide me PC! Hide me!
PC: Why, what's up?
Mac: They want to upgrade me!!
PC: Don't be afraid, look at me! Upgrading is great!
Mac: You don't understand!!!

Three guys run up, one shoots Mac dead while PC stands there stunned. Two of them drag off Mac. Third guy in natty sweater stands beside PC

PC: Who are you?
Mac: I'm Mac.

but ...

those apples commercials tell me they don't have security issues?

Re:but ...

No, there are no OS's without security issues. Even OpenBSD has had a few. Since Mac OS X uses many open standards / open source components, they benefit from the wide deployment, review, and testing that turns up bugs in that code and generates fixes. In closed OS's, the holes are still there, they just cannot be easily analyzed, so it's mostly the highly motivated "black hat" types that discover them and use them for their devious purposes.

The Mac ads clearly referred to all the viruses, worms, spyware, etc. Which are VERY common on Windows PCs, and for whatever reason, are very uncommon on Macs. (I don't really care why they are not prevalent on Macs, I just care that my MacBook Pro is free of exploits, as are my Linux servers.)

Patched bugs are a good thing. Bugs are practically unavoidable. Unpatched bugs, as evidenced by rampant exploits, are the real problem.

Quick summary to avoid reading TFA

10 of the 25 are local privilege escalations. A few more require physical access to the machine like loading a malformed disk. Some require authenticated access to the machine. (disk access, clear text password exchange, ftp user privilege escalation, untaring a malformed tar file, opening a malformed help file, etc).

The remote attacks seem to be coming out of the Kerebros admin daemon distributed by MIT 3 holes. One hole each in libinfo, portmap, ichat.

Re:Quick summary to avoid reading TFA

The remote attacks seem to be coming out of the Kerebros admin daemon distributed by MIT 3 holes.

That's the beauty of Open Source (from Apple's POV).

When things go well: Hey - look at us! We 'support' OSS by leveraging all that free software.
When things go bad: Oh well - it's MIT's software! Not ours...

Seriously - I for one am really glad that one closed O/S vendorout there lets OSS do the heavy lifting security wise on their products. Apple users are left in a far less leaky boat. Thanks MIT, Thanks FOSS, Thanks Apple!

Re:Quick summary to avoid reading TFA

Well, some FOSS supporters on Slashdot are known to equivocate about what "Linux" consists of. When trying to compare functionality with other OS's they consider the entire distro, when comparing stability or security the definition shrinks down to only the kernel.

Why is this news?

As an Apple 'outsider' I'm not certain why this is news.

Is it because these issues/vulnerabilities have been outstanding for a long time? Or perhaps Apple does not patch things often?

It's an honest question, my Ubuntu systems at home have frequent patches rolled out and the staff at work are always talking about another update on their Windows desktops.

Isn't Apple the same?

Re:Why is this news?

Also the vulnerability notes very clearly spell out what is affected. I am not a mac user. Still I could make sense of what is broken, whether or not I am running a vulnerable service, whehter or not I need this update.

Compare this to the dense hole descriptions by MSFT. Almost everything affects everything. Even if the bug in Windows is such that "If you dont user IE you are not vulnerable" they cant/wont say it. Wont say it because it will drive FireFox usage up. Cant say it because IE can be invoked by any part of any code. Similarly when a hole in Windows is found, no one seems to know what/who would be affected. Another reason why they dont describe it better is allegedly their fear that the hackers will use it to attack yet unupdated systems. But most hackers use reverse-engineering tools like BlackIce and deconstruct the patch and know precisely how to attack unpatched systems. On the other hand people who might be persuaded to patch their systems faster if the hole description was more specific and pertinent wait because they cant determine whether they are affected. Add to it MSFT's practice of downplaying the bug severity, no wonder MSFT updates are becoming more of a problem than solution.

Re:Why is this news?

Did you really mean to say that Apple releases patches more often than Microsoft? Because that is just plain wrong. I get pestered by Windows update at least twice as often as by OS X Software Update, and I use both operating systems regularly.

Just the facts

By constantly you mean, every 3 months or so. Some of the holes had been open for over 3 months with a rating of highly critical on secunia. Secunia still list 6 unpatched holes for OSX, highest being moderately critical. Quick comparision to vista which has two unpatched holes which have a rating of not critical.

Vista [secunia.com]
OS X [secunia.com]

Re:Just the facts

One thing to note: the one bug that Secunia is rating as "moderately critical" is on FTP, and it is not enabled by default.

Re:Why is this news?

It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost no (or none? The point is I've never come across one) viruses or worms.

I can only think of one in recent memory. The Hong Kong worm http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker/virus.html [makingpages.org], aka Autostart 9805, was pretty devasting to the pre-press industry which passed around zip cartridges like they were free. This would have been back in 1998.

Paul

Windows before 1997 had relatively few viruses too

It's worth noting that Mac OS 9, which had no security whatsoever, had almost no (or none? The point is I've never come across one) viruses or worms.

Back in the '80s and early '90s the Mac was a fertile breeding ground for viruses, because of the design of the system. Just putting a floppy in the drive was enough to run code. Apple's response to this was to get rid of automatic execution of code fragments on floppies and in resource forks of documents. This was a normal and sane response to a bad design.

If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus.

While the fact that there are more Windows boxes out there, there are several features of Windows that are insecure-by-design that have had a huge impact on Windows security. In particular, the design of Internet Explorer and the integration of the HTML control into the desktop and email programs had an enormous and direct effect on the spread of viruses and worms on Windows machines all out of proportion to their popularity.

Before the release of "Open Desktop", the virus problem on Windows really was managable without antivirus software. Just following good software hygiene was enough to make viruses a rare problem. Afterwards, I found that simply not allowing the use of IE and Outlook and other components that used the HTML control to display untrusted documents was more effective than antivirus software, because it removed the mosty common point of entry of new viruses.

The sane response to this would have been to back out the desktop-browser integration and redesign the system so that the right to run unsandboxed code was SOLELY mediated by the application displaying the document. Microsoft, instead, attempted to come up with tighter and tighter heuristics as to when to allow documents out of the sandbox, which boggled my mind then and still boggles my mind now.

There are other problems in the design of Windows that I've discussed before, but this one should be more than enough to make my point, especially after you handed me such a great counterexample.

Re:I'll tell you what's news:

If you are in charge of a business's IT department, do you want to go through and thoroughly test new patches every few days, or do one test covering multiple patches? Didn't feedback from big IT shops compel MS to release patches in bigger batches with less frequency (hence the introduction of "Patch Tuesday")?

I don't do IT, so maybe releasing 25 fixes at once can require 25 separate test cycles. Anybody care to enlighten me?

Re:I'll tell you what's news:

They rolled out these patches all at once. But the patches were almost certainly not done all at the same time. That's right, Apple has deliberately left you (and me! although I only have one mac to deal with and it's not my primary machine) vulnerable so that they could roll out a bunch of patches at the same time instead of one at a time.

Sigh. Have you ever worked in the software development industry. There is this thing called "testing" that some people find important. If you work on Kereberos and find a bug and patch it, you then test just it before distributing. If you work at Apple or Redhat where you are shipping an entire OS with a bunch of packages, it is impossible to patch and test those patches in conjunction with all other hardware in the same timeframe because you have multiple things to patch at once. Thus, the only real solution s to do it in bundles, where you stick a group of patches together then QA them all at once. This results in longer delays for some fixes, but it also means the patch is actually tested in conjunction with the other patches so one does not break another. Any responsible vendor uses this method for dealing with bugs.

Once again, the methodology commonly used by Linux distributions in which patches are rolled out as soon as they are ready provides greater security than Microsoft or Apple (who do the very same thing.)

Individual developers roll out patches and you could have patched your OS X box from them if you felt it was an emergency for you. As for what Linux vendors do, I don't know of any who roll one-off fixes into the stable branch intended for real use, instead of testing patches in bundles. You don't seem to know what you're talking about.

In other news...

Microsoft Issues Holes for 25 Security Patches

Why

Why isn't this listed under "HaHa" as well? Not trolling, as much as wondering what the reasoning of that was for. Bias?

Re:Why

I think because no one really believes that Apple software is completely bulletproof. No software is completely bulletproof. I'm sure someone could find an exploit even for a Hello World program. Windows gets the majority of the "bad press" from flaws because it has a gigantic market share compared to Apple, so the security holes and related patches affect many more people.

Yes, some Windows folks will see this as a "haha" nelson moment. However, it isn't a haha moment until the headline reads that someone found 25 Apple exploits and released a huge virus to exploit them. And while I am firmly planted in my Windows environment, I will not be interested in laughing at my Apple compadres when or if that happens.

10.3.9 also patched

Apple is providing some patches for 10.3.9 as well. Good to see that they are still providing security related updates for the previous system.

25 holes? Wow.

If this was an MS System, we'd now be at SP1.

Not news...

Don't ALL operating systems have holes? I think the only thing different here is that Apple waited until there were a lot found and fixed to release the patch. MS and Apple release patches differently; MS releases them as soon as they can, one at a time usually, while Apple chooses to wait until there are a lot of patches to release it. Not really the best idea, but not the worst for both companies. Not news.

Apple fixes, are they better documented yet?

One problem I have with Apple is that their change logs and what's new on releases and patches are poorly documented if ever. iPod is a good example. I guess you're supposed to apply the 'don't fix it if it ain't broke' approach which is good. But then why does iTunes constantly remind me of available updates? In either case I hope Apple documents their fixes on the computer side a little better. That way I can decide if I need to fix them.

And as for the MS ObiWan Kenfanboys, just because MS has a constant stream of fixes, doesn't make them better. I just saw 6 patches for code I don't use. That it's imperative for the people who do run it to apply these fixes means nothing to me. But chalk it up to at least documenting it so I don't waste time with them.

MS Patch management

My work laptop (XP Pro) has developed an aversion to installing Office XP components. I tried to add MS-Access for a special project. In "Add/Remove programs" from the Control Panel it fails silently. From setup.exe on the the CD I get this message: "No valid sequence could be found for the set of patches."

This appears to be related to the Microsoft Windows Installer (msi.dll).

Eventually, I tried to uninstall Office XP and start over. The machine refuses do do this with another silent failure. I considered uninstalling msi, but it warns me that every program on the computer may fail to work if I do so. Microsoft list a large number of registry hacks that might either fix the problem or create a doorstop.

Now I'm looking at starting from a fresh install.

I do not know if the frequency and volume of patches from Microsoft is related, but I am highly suspicious that msi.dll is confused because of this. Microsoft describes Microsoft Windows Installer as "...an installation and configuration service that reduces the total cost of ownership." Not.

Automated Exploits

Fortunately there are no automated exploit tools readily available for these mac vulnerabilities like there are Windows.

PWN to OWN

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=173 [zdnet.com]
So I wonder if this invalidates the contest. This just revealed vulns that aren't patched on the contest machines.

More Windows 2K security problems Options

ANY security problem is automatically assigned "critical" status.You claim that you know for a fact that Apple never releases any information on their security problems to the public because a source told you that they don't. When it was demonstrated that you were wrong,the voices in your head changed their story. For more on the subject you shall better visit me at: web design company [webdesigningcompany.net] Apple almost always waits until the next build to fix security problems. They can get away with this because there is never any press stories calling attention to flaws. Microsoft being more proactive releases critical updates with hours of problems being discovered. Of course Apple is not going to publicize the newest security problems because they don't like to release patchs but rather new builds. Apple released a document with security updates. If you can't find a MS document just as easily, then how can you say that MS is more forthcoming with their information? I have not even tried and will not try. I dont waste time on Macer boondoggle requests. You're pretending that MS has better security - in spite of the fact that even MIcrosoft disagrees with you. You are the pretender here. Pretending to have a healthy brain.

Re:Appropriate?

The "defectivebydesign" tag is intended for use whenever discussing DRM and the way that technology can and will be changed to further restrict or disenfranchise you from using content on your own hardware, even if you are otherwise completely in the clear by your rights as a consumer and citizen of your particular country. It's defective, but it was intentionally designed to be that way.

Not that it's not misused occasionally by idiots and zealots, but there you are.

Re:Huh?

Got Mod?

Re:Cue Apologists

And yet, our biggest problems (botnets) are not usually from any particular vulnerability, but rather from stupid users running that great attachment they got from 'their friend'. Don't the M$ fanboys claim that Macs are for the clueless? If so, then why aren't Macintoshes part of the botnet problem?

Re:MS flaws = bad, Apple flaws = good...?

Yeha, that's usually how it happens. Microsoft has holes because the OS supposedly stinks, all other OS's Just patch holes to make their OS even better.

Basically saying, "I'm not screwing the sheep. I'm Merely helping it through the fence."

Re:Cue Apologists

Generally when they say 'secure' they mean 'susceptible to attack'.

Windows is, in its default configuration. FreeBSD, Linux and Mac OS X (not to mention a fair few others) aren't.

Some local privilege escalations that nobody beyond a couple of security researchers have paid attention to is nothing compared to the stuff a Windows user has to put up with.

For average Joe on the street who connects his computer to the Internet and browses the web and so forth, the vulnerabilities mean approximately squat.

Re:I'd like to propose a tag

I think you have totally misunderstood what that tag means. It means that the designer specifically designed the device to not do something that is normally expected or wanted, or has been designed in such a way as to annoy the user constantly. In other words, they had to work harder to make sure the device did not work. Typical MS things that are defective by design are DRM, Clippy, and that new security thing in Vista that is so annoying.

These were bugs, not by design. Apple didn't not specifically intend for them to exist, and has now fixed them.

Re:Cue Apologists

Here we go, another uptight suit fretting that that competition has just improved while their own latest attempt at imitation continues to flop.

Aren't you late for you colonic ?

Re:Huh?

Linux does it, and the guy who found the bug is of course the first to do so.

Re:Huh?

Heu!!!! how can you say that they are proactive if the patches fixes issue that are already there and they know about it.

proactive is seeing for potential threat in the future and taking steps to correct them before they happen

There are no more proactive than any other company when it comes to bugs and patches.

Re:MS flaws = bad, Apple flaws = good...?

>Also, Windows is not the preferred OS for the slashdot crowd.

Is there a poll to this effect? I find that hard to believe.

Re:Huh?

It's "shouldn't have," not "shouldn't of". Jackass.

Re:Appropriate?

Given the smug "it's so secure" comments from Mac users, I would agree the 'haha' would be appropriate. However, defectivebydesign insinuates that it is intended to be problematic or broken, and is not appropriate in this case. It's not appropriate in similar cases on MS news articles either, but /. is hardly an unbiased group. Additonally, many people want to lash out at MS, making them a good target. Few people care enough about Apple to give a damn.

Re:Huh?

The difference is, no one has exploited the Apple security loopholes yet, while with Microsoft they are reacting after there have already been attacks.

Re:Huh?

No such opinion appears in the article, and, your comment being the first post, clearly no such opinion has been expressed on Slashdot. So shut the fuck up and sit down.

OT: Re:I'd like to propose a tag

But, would you ever want do search for articles about things that are "defectivebydesign?" It's commentary-in-the-tags that caused me to disable them in my profile months ago.

For instance, on any article which poses a question, you can invariably find the tags, "yes," "no," and "maybe." But since they're so often together, they're basically redundant: searching any of them brings up the same articles. Better would be to use the tag, "question." but since all of the questions are titled ASK SLASHDOT, even this is redundant. Best would be to categorize based on the subject of the question, so people looking for questions (and answers) about say, linux wifi networking could search for the tags "linux," and "wifi" under ask.slashdot and find what they're looking for.

Still even if the tags were working, there still wouldn't be a reason to display by default, since you only really need them for searching. You don't even really need to see them to add them.

Re:MS flaws = bad, Apple flaws = good...?

"The 802.11 thing was apparently due to some legal crap and was only $5 anyway."

That's great.
Now please explain why Apple charges $10 to enable its video player to play videos full-screen. While you're at it, please explain why Apple charges another $10 for an MPEG2 codec for that same video player, when the OS already ships with an MPEG2 codec (which is used to allow its DVD player to play DVDs).

Jobs knows how to nickel and dime his user base for all they're worth. He knows that they'll just line up, bend over, and take it with a smile on their faces (as evidenced by your sycophantic post).