“Apple yesterday issued an emergency security update for the Mac, patching the same trio of vulnerabilities the company fixed last week on the iPhone,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld. “According to one of the groups that first revealed the flaws, the vulnerabilities could have been ‘weaponized’ for use against OS X, the Mac’s operating system.”
“The out-of-band update was aimed at OS X El Capitan (aka 10.11) and Yosemite (10.10), the 2015 and 2014 editions, respectively,” Keizer reports. “According to reports from researchers at mobile security vendor Lookout and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the trio of bugs were used to spy on an activist in the United Arab Emirates by turning his iPhone into a surveillance tool.”
Keizer reports, “Prior to the disclosure last week, the vulnerabilities, pegged as ‘Trident’ by Citizen Labs, were ‘zero-days,’ or unknown to Apple, and so extremely valuable on the black market.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Today, the Apple ecosystem is even safer! If you haven’t updated your Mac with Security Update 2016-001 El Capitan or Security Update 2016-005 Yosemite, do so ASAP.
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