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VIRTUALISATION Mac security under renewed question
VIRTUALISATION Mac security under renewed question | Mac security under renewed question |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Friday, 17 April 2009 | |
  
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The result of mounting a maliciously formed HFS disk image file is that the user gains root privileges. The exploit is one of several revealed at last month's CanSecWest 2009 conference by Christer Oberg and Neil Kettle. It could be used by someone that has legitimate access to a system with normal user privileges in order to carry out unauthorised activities that require admin rights. The vulnerability is said to be present in all versions of Mac OS X from 10.4.0 onwards, including the Snow Leopard betas. Other Mac OS X vulnerabilities disclosed by Oberg and Kettle involve kernel memory leaks and/or denial of service conditions. The two researchers also disclosed an exploit for FreeBSD that gives root privileges to a local user. Unlike the Mac OS X flaws, this one has already been patched. In other security news, researchers at Symantec have linked the iService trojan (malware distributed by hiding it inside pirated iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 installers) with the first known Mac OS X based botnet. The botnet appears to have carried out a distributed denial of service attack against a website. At least one user (a Melbourne-based software developer) figured out what was going on a few months ago, but the Trojan itself received much more coverage than its payload. |
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