How Snow Leopard can save Mac OS X from malware attacks

June 24, 2008 (Tuesday) | MacOS X

Guest Editorial by Dino Dai Zovi As reported by Intego and Matasano Security, a new local privilege escalation vulnerability has been found that gives local root access on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. While Intego calls this a critical vulnerability, I'm mostly with Matasano's Thomas Ptacek on this one where I am saying this vulnerability is not nearly that serious.  For one, it only works when it is run as the user who is logged into the console.  This means that no Mac OS X servers are affected by this, but it can allow a Web exploit or Trojan horse to gain root access without the user's knowledge or permission.  Also while root access is pretty serious, it is...