Critical patches emerge for Mac OS X security holes

by Graham Cluley on January 20, 2010 | Comments Off

Filed Under: Adobe Flash, Apple, Malware, Vulnerability

It's not clear if Apple was feeling left out with all the attention being given to a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but they have issued a security update for users of their Mac OS X operating system.

2010's first security update from Apple is designed to better protect its users from hacker attacks, and patches a dozen vulnerabilities in a variety of components including CoreAudio, the Adobe Flash Player plug-in, ImageIO, Image RAW and OpenSSL.

Apple security update for Mac OS X

If hackers took advantage of these security flaws they could potentially infect users by getting them to open an audio file or tricking them into visiting a boobytrapped website.

The update to Flash Player tackles the critical security problems reported by Adobe in early December.

As usual, Mac users can update their systems via Software Update or by visiting the Downloads section of Apple's website.

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About the author

Graham Cluley has worked in the computer security industry for more than 20 years, developing anti-virus software and doing quite a lot of talking about internet threats. He's won awards for his blogging, but is proudest of the text adventure games he wrote when he was still wearing short trousers. You can learn more about those (the games, not the trousers) at grahamcluley.com. Send Graham an email, subscribe to his updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and App.net, and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.