Currnet Macintosh OS X vulnerabilities or exploits?

February 3, 2008 3:36 PM

What is the current state of the art in Macintosh OS X vulnerabilities, exploits and other remote security issues?

I'm a recent convert to OS X, and I'm fairly familiar with Unix/Linux/BSD - however, my primary work and IT experience is with Windows.

As such, I like to stay informed of these issues - and I also like experimenting with my own machines - and I like to feel more secure about the machines I use by knowing what is and isn't possible.

What's new? What should I be aware of as an IT consultant and support tech? What can I experiment with at home?

I'm particularly interested in buffer overflow exploits, pings-o-death and other remote DoS or TCP/IP stack attacks.

posted by loquacious to technology (4 comments total)

http://secunia.com/vendor/17/

There aren't tons of known unpatched vulnerabilities, and most of those are local vulnerabilities, not remote. That's good. As far as the non-Apple software that ships with Mac OS X (Apache, PHP, etc), you have basically a similar same state as other major Unix variants.

There may be a DNS hijack trojan in the wild that pretends to be a QuickTime codec:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071101-rsplug-a-mac-os-x-trojan-a-new-threat-but-the-sky-is-not-falling.html

Low-threat, not based on a vulnerability in the system:

"One important thing to keep in mind is that this trojan does not exploit any Mac OS X weakness, relying instead on social engineering to deliver the payload. The user is asked for the administrator password, the disk image is mounted, and the malware installed."

Overall, the state of Mac OS X is pretty good. Browse the Secunia database for Apple if you're really interested in knowing more.
posted by Mikey-San at 4:08 PM on February 3, 2008

If users turn on (largely open-source) services in OS X, this can sometimes open up the workstation to attack. http://milw0rm.com/ and http://www.rootsecure.net/ have lots of script kiddie stuff. There are lots of other sites. But on the whole, out of the box, OS X is pretty secure for a consumer OS.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:15 PM on February 3, 2008

it's pretty darn secure compared to a real modern OS.

compared to windows, it's like the difference between a bank vault and a soggy cardboard cigar box.
posted by KenManiac at 9:26 PM on February 3, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The NSA has a 171 page guide on hardening OS X. The tips are summarized in this article.
posted by sharkfu at 11:50 PM on February 3, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]