“Researchers have made it easier to exploit a five-month-old security flaw that allows penetration testers and less-ethical hackers to gain nearly unfettered ‘root’ access to Macs over which they already have limited control,” Dan Goodin reports for Ars Technica.
“The authentication bypass vulnerability was reported in March and resides in a Unix component known as sudo. While the program is designed to require a password before granting ‘super user’ privileges such as access to other users’ files, the bug makes it possible to obtain that sensitive access by resetting the computer clock to January 1, 1970,” Goodin reports. “That date is known in computing circles as the Unix epoch, and it represents the beginning of time as measured by the operating system and most of the applications that run on it. By invoking the sudo command and then resetting the date, computers can be tricked into turning over root privileges without a password.”
Goodin reports, “Mac users should realize that an attacker must satisfy a variety of conditions before being able to exploit this vulnerability. For one, the end-user who is logged in must already have administrator privileges. And for another, the user must have successfully run sudo at least once in the past. And of course, the attacker must already have either physical or remote shell access to the target machine.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We hope to see this fixed in the imminent OS X 10.8.5.