:: Deepquest ::

Apple on Wednesday patched 18 holes in its Mac OS X operating system, seven that could allow an attacker to remotely take over a machine when a user does nothing more than view a booby-trapped image.

The ImageIO Framework, which helps Mac applications read and write popular image formats, was responsible for five of the image vulnerabilities. A color management interface known as ColorSync and a component known as ImageRAW were to blame for the other two. The vulnerabilities create an ideal scenario for attackers, who could use specially manipulated PNG, OpenEXR and RAW files to remotely execute malicious code on the machines of oblivious users.

The flaws are the result of unitialized memory errors, unitialized pointer issues and heap, stack and integer overflows. Other patches fixed code-execution vulnerabilities in the OS X kernel, login window and other components in the OS.

from The Register