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Apple kills Jailbreakme Mac bug

RIP, browse-and-get-hacked vuln

Apple has purged Mac OS X of a browse-and-get-hacked vulnerability that first came to light three weeks ago, when the popular Jailbreakme service used it to root fully patched versions of the iPhone.

The buffer overflow flaw in an OS component that parses fonts was one of 13 vulnerabilities Apple fixed in an update released on Tuesday. It allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code on vulnerable machines simply by getting the user to view a booby-trapped PDF document. A related bug was patched two weeks ago in iOS, which powers the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod Touch.

The vulnerability in the latter devices was being actively exploited by Jailbreakme, allowing users to jailbreak their device by doing nothing more than visiting the site and flicking a slider. There were no reports of the vulnerability being exploited in OS X.

Tuesday's update also patched a hole in CFNetwork that allowed attackers to bypass secure sockets layer protection, and it fixed a variety of third-party components including ClamAV, Samba and PHP.

The fixes came the same day that Adobe patched 20 holes in its widely used Shockwave Player.

More from Apple and Adobe is here and here. ®

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