Apple issues Mac OS X security patch

22/05/2004 Written by Ina Fried

Apple Com­puter on Fri­day issued an update to Mac OS X to address flaws that secu­rity firms said could allow mali­cious code to be run on a Macintosh.
The update fixes a pair of flaws that could be used to cre­ate a virus that spreads through a Web link sent via e-​mail messages.An attacker also would have to cre­ate a Web site with spe­cial pro­gram­ming to exploit the vulnerability.

The issue was made pub­lic this week, although the per­son who dis­cov­ered the prob­lem claims to have noti­fied Apple in Feb­ru­ary.




Secu­rity infor­ma­tion ser­vice Secu­nia on Tues­day rated the issue “extremely crit­i­cal,” because online dis­cus­sions have pointed out many dif­fer­ent ways to exploit the flaws.

Apple took the unusual step of issu­ing a press release to tout its secu­rity update, but a rep­re­sen­ta­tive refused to answer all ques­tions regard­ing the issue, includ­ing why it has taken since Feb­ru­ary to get a patch for the soft­ware.

“Apple takes secu­rity very seri­ously and works quickly to address poten­tial threats as we learn of them – in this case, before there was any actual risk to our cus­tomers,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice pres­i­dent of world­wide mar­ket­ing, said in the press release.

The Mac has gen­er­ally had a rep­u­ta­tion for hav­ing fewer secu­rity issues – and less seri­ous ones than Windows-​based machines. How­ever, Apple has recently been crit­i­cized for not ade­quately dis­clos­ing the nature of flaws in OS X and for its lack of response to secu­rity indus­try con­cerns.

Apple encour­aged all Mac own­ers to install all Mac OS X updates on their machines to best pro­tect their sys­tems.