ID: IRCNE2013091955
Date: 2013-09-14
According to "computerworld", Apple on Thursday updated OS X Mountain Lion to version 10.8.5, likely the final refresh of the 14-month-old operating system before the company supersedes it with OS X Mavericks.
The update, a combination of security, stability and compatibility fixes, patched a total of 30 vulnerabilities in Mountain Lion. It was accompanied by security-only updates for 2011's OS X 10.7, aka Lion, and 2009's OS X 10.6, known as Snow Leopard. This was the first time since early June that Apple refreshed Mountain Lion.
Apple called out several non-security fixes inside 10.8.5, including ones that addressed a bug that blocked the bundled Mail email client from displaying messages, improved file transfer performance and reliability over Wi-Fi and Ethernet networks, and tweaked connections between Macs and Apple's Xsan storage area network.
On the security side, 10.8.5 patched 30 vulnerabilities, including 7 labeled with the line "may lead to ... arbitrary code execution," which is Apple's way of saying that they're critical. The fixes quashed bugs in several open-source components integrated with Mountain Lion, such as Apache (4 patches); Bind (5), the most widely-used DNS (domain name system) software for routing Internet requests to the correct addresses; OpenSSL (3); and PHP (4), the server-side scripting language.
One of the patches was for a several-months-old vulnerability in the Unix component known as "sudo," which lets users gain super-user or "root" rights. By resetting the system clock, hackers who have already managed to grab limited control of a Mac can sidestep the need for the root-access password.
Also published Thursday was an update to Safari 5, the Apple browser for Snow Leopard. Apple had patched the same bugs in the newer Safari 6 last year.
OS X 10.8.5 and Security Update 2013-003 -- the latter targets OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Lion, which at this point receive only security fixes -- can be retrieved by selecting "Software Update..." from the Apple menu, or by opening the Mac App Store application and clicking the Update icon at the top right. The updates can also be downloaded manually from Apple's support site.
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