Teen Discovers Two Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In OS X

Say a few years ago, when the topic of OS X versus Windows came up, the favorite argument that was used is that OS X is more secure than Windows as there are less cases of malware and viruses attacking the system. Fast forward to today, that statement might not be so true after all.

In fact in the recent years we have been seeing more security issues and flaws discovered within OS X. Recently an Italian teen was responsible for discovering two zero-day vulnerabilities in OS X that would have allowed a hacker who knew about said flaws to gain remote access to the system.

Luca Todesco, the teen in question, posted the details of the exploit he developed on GitHub. The exploit he uses uses two bugs that will cause a memory corruption in OS X’s kernel, and because of the corruption, the kernel address space layout randomization can then be circumvented, thus bypassing the security meant to keep out attackers in the first place.

That being said, the flaws appear to have been fixed in the latest beta of OS X El Capitan. However computers running OS X 10.9.5 through 10.10.5 remain affected by it. According to Todesco, he had informed Apple of the issue prior to uploading his findings online.

Filed in Apple >Computers. Read more about OS X and Security.