News: Microsoft offers Apple security advice
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As the WWDC crowd awaits iPhone info, Apple's chief lays out new features in the upcoming OS. Also: Safari for Windows.
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Speaking at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo 2004 in Orlando, Florida, yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer outlined new security initiatives, some of which would make it into a pre-Longhorn &#39;Release 2&#39; for Windows, next year.
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(InfoWorld) - Apple Computer will soon be a member of the "month of bugs" club. On Jan. 1, two security researchers will begin publishing details of a flood of security vulnerabilities in Apple's products.Â Their planÂ is to disclose one bug per day for the entire month, they said Tuesday. The project is being launched by an independent security researcher, Kevin Finisterre, and a hacker known as LMH, who declined to reveal his identity. Some of the bugs "might represent a significant risk," LMH said in an e-mail interview. "Others have a lower impact on security. We are trying to develop working exploits for every issue we find." The two hackers plan to disclose bugs in the Mac OS X kernel as well as in software such as Safari, iTunes, iPhoto and QuickTime, LMH said. Some of the bugs will also affect versions of Apple's software designed to run on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, he added. LMH was one of the brains behind the recent Month of Kernel Bugs project, which exposed flaws at the core of several different operating systems. It was inspired by an earlier effort, called the Month of Browser Bugs, which was kicked off in July. This latest Apple project is being launched to raise awareness of security vulnerabilities in Apple's products and to "stomp smugness," Finisterre said via e-mail. While the Macintosh is generally considered to be more secure than the Windows PC, many security researchers believe that this reputation is not attributable to any superior security practices on the part of Apple. They say attackers have been deterred by the Mac OS X's more secure Unix kernel and the product's less widespread adoption. Apple enthusiasts and security researchers have been at odds since last August, when David Maynor and Jon Ellch claimed to have discovered a flaw that affected Apple's wireless device drivers. They played a video at the Black Hat conference demonstrating how this flaw could be used to run unauthorized code on a MacBook. However, their claims have been slammed because the demonstration used a third-party wireless card rather than the one that ships with the MacBook, and because the two hackers still have not published the code used in their attack. LMH said the Apple community's negative response to Maynor and Ellch's claims played a role in the decision to launch the Month of Apple bugs. "I was shocked with the reaction of some so-called 'Apple fans,'" he said. "I can't understand why some people react badly to disclosure of issues in their system of choice. ... That helps to improve its security." A similar effort to disclose flaws in Oracle's software had to be abandoned before it was ever launched last month. The man behind the Week of Oracle bugs, Cesar Cerrudo, of Argeniss Information Security, said he pulled the plug when it became clear that the project could damage the relationship between one of his customers and Oracle. "This customer realized that they could have had serious business problems, so they changed their mind and asked to cancel it," he said via instant message on Tuesday. LMH said he didn't expect any legal problems from Apple. "I keep talking to a guy from the Apple security team and I'm willing to help whenever necessary," he said. "I'm far away from any illegal activity." Apple, for its part, did not seem to be upset with the project. "WeÂ always welcome feedback on how to improve security on the Mac," said Anuj Nayar, an Apple spokesman. Â
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Executive offers advice on how to combat growing security threats linked to use of Bluetooth-equipped devices.
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The security features introduced in Apple&#39;s Leopard operating system need work. That&#39;s according to security experts who have been putting the new version of Mac OS X through its paces since&#160;the upgrade was introduced&#160;last Friday.Leopard introduces a number of important security features to the Mac, but they are often implemented incompletely, leaving users vulnerable to attack, said Thomas Ptacek, a researcher at Matasano Security, who Monday wrote a detailed assessment of Leopard&#39;s security.&quot;They&#39;ve done a really good job of robbing Microsoft advocates of their talking points,&quot; he said. But, &quot;I don&#39;t see anything that they&#39;ve done out of the box, where it&#39;s really any more resistant to attack than Tiger was,&quot; he added, referring to the previous update to Apple&#39;s operating system.According to Ptacek, two of Apple&#39;s key security enhancements -- Sandboxing and Library Randomization -- are great ideas that are imperfectly applied within Leopard.Take Library Randomization. It&#39;s a new feature that&#39;s supposed to make it hard for some of the most commonly used computer attacks like buffer overflows, where the attacker takes advantage of a software bug to place code somewhere in the computer&#39;s memory where he knows it will be run. Microsoft developed a similar technology for Vista, called Address Space Load Randomization. Library Randomization makes it much harder, if not impossible, for the attacker to know where to place this code, reducing the risk of attack.The problem is that Apple did not randomize all of the parts of the operating system that it should have, according to Ptacek. In particular, Apple&#39;s Dynamic Link Library has not been randomized.Security researcher Dino Dai Zovi said he&#39;s used this library in several of the Mac exploits he&#39;s written over the past few years. He has taken advantage of the fact that this library is not randomized, he agreed with Ptacek&#39;s assessment that this feature, as it&#39;s implemented in Leopard, would simply make things a little more difficult for attackers.Sandboxing is another feature that could ultimately make Mac OS X more secure. Sandboxing restricts software running on Mac OS so that even if it&#39;s hacked, it can&#39;t do things that it shouldn&#39;t, such as add new software to the computer. The problem is that Apple hasn&#39;t sandboxed many of the most commonly attacked applications such as the browser, mail client, or instant messaging software, Ptacek said.And the programs that have been sandboxed have not been walled off as thoroughly as they should be, he added.For example, the Quick Look file viewer has been sandboxed, but only to restrict network access. The software can still be misused to write malicious files where they will be automatically launched, Dai Zovi said. &quot;Most of the things that were sandboxed were network services,&quot; he said. &quot;Increasingly these days IM, e-mail and Web surfing are where most of the attacks are coming from, not directly on your network.&quot;Independent consultant Rich Mogull said that his biggest problem was with the Leopard firewall, which he said suffered from a confusing interface that made it very difficult to control access to individual services on the Mac. &quot;It was very complicated and very hard to get the right settings,&quot; he said.Worse, when he installed Leopard, he found himself suddenly without a firewall. &quot;It turned off my firewall when I upgraded, despite that being a default setting.&quot; he said.Like Ptacek and Dai Zovi, Mogull said he had been expecting more from Apple with the Leopard release, but he agreed that the new security features were a step in the right direction. &quot;I think that Apple has started down the right path but they are not as far as they communicated that they would be,&quot; he said. &quot;The firewall is the big negative; they really messed that up.&quot;Apple declined to comment in detail on its new security features. Company spokesman Anuj Nayar said via e-mail that &quot;Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users.&quot;Ptacek said that it is great that Apple has begun adding these security features even when the Mac has not been the target of a widespread worm or virus outbreak. &quot;I&#39;m impressed that when they didn&#39;t have to do it, they went after low-level features that no one will understand,&quot; he said. &quot;I like the direction they&#39;re headed. I&#39;m just saying that they&#39;ve got a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft.&quot;&#160;
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Apple Inc. has posted a series of documents online that detail various issues related to its new MacBook Air laptop and offers new owners advice on how to deal with them.
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Software giant Microsoft on Tuesday announced 10 security advisories, seven of them critical, urging consumers to patch 21 new flaws in its software products.
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Microsoft boss Bill Gates tells the BBC that better security is the top priority for the company.
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(InfoWorld) - Apple is becoming a favorite target of security researchers these days. In April, there was the $10,000 CanSecWest hack a Mac contest, and on Monday, there was the Safari Web browser. Or the public beta of Safari for Windows, anyway. Just hours after Apple released its first Windows beta of Safari, researcher Aviv Raff said he'd found a bug. In an interview, Raff said that it took about three minutes of fuzzing to find the bug and that he hadn't tested the issue on Mac OS X. So he couldn't say whether or not it affected Safari on Windows only. The bug causes the browser to crash and "might be exploitable," according to Raff, meaning it could possibly be used to run malware on the PC. Raff was clearly unhappy with Apple's claim that Safari was designed to be "secure from day one" (he called this claim "pathetic"), but he said he wasn't particularly going after Apple. "I don't pick just on Apple," he said. "I've posted about Microsoft and Mozilla issues too." "Everyone has bugs, but not everyone says that they are 'designed to be secured from day one,'" he added. "I guess it's day zero now."
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Apple issues patch for iTunes to prevent attacks. Also: Identity thief gets jail time.
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Microsoft released five security bulletins on Tuesday as part of its monthly update cycle, warning of vulnerabilities that put computers running Windows at risk of attack.
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Microsoft today released five Security Bulletins warning of several vulnerabilities that put computers running Windows at risk of attack. None are rated "critical," Microsoft's highest severity rating.
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(InfoWorld) - Apple on Thursday unveiled the year's fifth major security update for Mac OS X to patch 17 vulnerabilities, but fewer than one-third of them could lead to hackers injecting their own code into a compromised system. Thursday's release also marked the first time this year that an operating system security update from Apple did not patch a vulnerability disclosed by the January Month of Apple Bugs project. If Apple sorted bugs by a ranking system -- as do other vendors, including Microsoft Corp. -- most of the bugs fixed by Security Update 2007-005 would be rated less than critical. In eight out of the 17, for example, exploits could do no more damage than to generate a denial of service of, or crash, the affected component. Microsoft typically pegs such vulnerabilities as "important" rather than "critical." Only five of the patched vulnerabilities could result in an attacker executing his own code. Among the serious bugs is one in how Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger, handles PDF files. "By enticing a user to open a maliciously crafted PDF file, an attacker could trigger the overflow, which may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution," Apple's advisory said. Attacks sporting this strategy, although rare on Macs, are common threats faced by Windows users, who have had to learn -- sometimes unsuccessfully -- to be wary of unexpected file attachments. Another dangerous flaw fixed Thursday exists in the code that maps ports on home networks in iChat, Apple's instant messaging service and software. An attacker need only send a malformed packet to trigger a buffer overflow, which could then be used to add malicious code to the Mac. The hacker, however, must have access to the local network to exploit the bug. Other parts of Mac OS X that were patched Thursday include BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the de facto standard Domain Name System server software, which was patched against four vulnerabilities; the Ruby CGI library (two vulnerabilities); and Fetchmail (one vulnerability). Although Thursday's update pushed Apple's year-to-date patch total to over 100, there was a bright side: It included fixes for fewer flaws thanÂ last monthÂ (25) and the month before (45). The security update can be downloaded from theÂ Apple siteÂ or using Mac OS X's built-in update service.
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Microsoft gives away a security firewall with its latest operating system. Many high-speed Internet service providers offer free anti-virus protection for subscribers. And several Web sites distribute free toolbars to warn of Web scams.
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Debate rages over whether the Mac operating system is inherently safer than Windows. Part of a series on hot security topics.
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Blog: This rare, tenth update of an Apple OS includes a networking security patch.