ID: IRCNE2011061156
Date: 2011-06-25
According to “ComputerWorld”, Apple on Thursday released the final feature update for Snow Leopard. Included in the update to Mac OS X 10.6.7 were patches for 36 vulnerabilities in Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server.
Apple also issued a security-only update for Mac OS X 10.5, better known as Leopard, that fixed 13 flaws in the 2007 operating system. But most Mac users will be interested in the update because it's a prerequisite for Lion, the Mac OS X upgrade Apple plans to sell through the Mac App Store in July.
At the top of the list of changes in 10.6.8, Apple put "Enhancements to the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion." Apple did not elaborate on what had changed in Mac App Store.
Apple also shipped new signatures to detect and delete variants of the MacDefender "scareware". Apple has delivered 12 different MacDefender signatures since it acknowledged the scareware problem in late May.
Mac OS X 10.6.8 will be the last non-security update to Snow Leopard. Once a new edition of Mac OS X appears, Apple issues only vulnerability patches for the previous version.
Tucked into Mac OS X 10.6.8 were patches for 36 security flaws, 29 of them tagged with Apple's traditional phrase "arbitrary code execution". According to Apple's advisory, one of the bugs can be exploited by "drive-by" attacks that execute as soon as a victim with an unpatched Mac OS X visits a malicious website. Eight of the vulnerabilities could be triggered simply by viewing a malformed file -- a Microsoft Office document in one case, a malicious image in most of the others -- that could be used to inject attack code.
Apple also reported a bug in the App Store that in some circumstances could disclose the Apple ID used to sign in to the download site.
Mac OS X 10.6.8 and the separate 2011-004 security update for Leopard can be downloaded at the Apple site or installed using the operating system's built-in update service.
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