“An Italian teenager has found two zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple’s OS X operating system that could be used to gain remote access to a computer,” Jeremy Kirk reports for IDG News Service.
“Luca Todesco, 18, posted details of the exploit he developed on GitHub,” Kirk reports. “The exploit uses two bugs to cause a memory corruption in OS X’s kernel, he wrote via email. The memory corruption condition can then be used to circumvent kernel address space layout randomization (kASLR), a defensive technique designed to thwart exploit code from running. The attacker then gains a root shell.”
“The exploit code works in OS X versions 10.9.5 through 10.10.5. It is fixed in OS X 10.11, the beta version of the next Apple OS nicknamed El Capitan,” Kirk reports. “Todesco, who said he does security research in his spare time, said he notified Apple of the problems ‘a few hours before the exploit was published.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, thanks for the “few hours” notice, asshat.