Month of Kernel Bugs Starts With Apple: November Should be Fun

well, which do you think is more likely in the future—hackers that are pissed off at Apple, or hackers that want to get a little of Maynor/Ellch fame?

I know the hackers are pissed, but this month isn’‘t focusing on Apple. The kick off with a WiFI flaw was definitely to make a point, but we can expect flaws over the rest of the month in all operating systems.

[...] We talked a little about this in our first post on kernel bugs. Because of how OS X manages disk image files, if you mount a malicious disk image (even if you don’t run anything inside of it) an attacker could take over your system. This is a kernel flaw- so you don’t need to be running as root or with administrator privileges. The attacker will totally own your system, and can use it, just as Windows systems are commonly used, to attack your friends and associates. A really nasty attacker might even do some nasty things like try and identify other Mac users based on their address book settings or by trolling your inbox for Mac-formatted emails. [...]