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Apple has released updates to patch dozens of security vulnerabilities in iOS and OS X Yosemite operating system. The updates include iOS 8.4 version of the mobile operating system, OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 and Security Update 2015-005. iOS 8.4 Update The iOS 8.4  update includes patches for over 20 security vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution (RCE) , application termination, the intercepted encrypted traffic, man-in-the-middle attacks and other problem. Certificate trust policy issues, buffer overflow vulnerabilities, apache compatibility issues, memory corruption flaws, and a host of WebKit, kernel, and CoreText vulnerabilities were also patched in the latest iOS update. OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 update The OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 update includes patches for QuickTime, ImageIO, and OpenSSL along with Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaws and other issues that may allow attackers to gain elevated privileges or crash applications. The Safari 8.

A zero-day software vulnerability discovered deep in the firmware of many Apple computers could allows an attacker to modify the system's BIOS and install a rootkit , potentially gaining complete control of the victim's Mac. The critical vulnerability, discovered by well-known OS X security researcher Pedro Vilaca, affects Mac computers shipped before mid-2014 that are allowed to go into sleep mode. While studying Mac security, Vilaca found that it's possible to tamper with Apple computer's UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) code. UEFI is a low-level firmware designed to improve upon computer's BIOS, which links a computer's hardware and operating system at startup and is typically not accessible to users. But… Vilaca found that the machine's UEFI code can be unlocked after a computer is put to sleep and then brought back up. " And you ask, what the hell does this mean? " Vilaca wrote in a blog post published Friday. " It means th

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Sad but True! Your Apple's Mac computer is vulnerable to a serious privilege escalation flaw, dubbed "RootPipe," even if you are running the latest version of Mac OS X. What's RootPipe? Back in October 2014, a Swedish White Hat hacker Emil Kvarnhammar claimed to have discovered a critical privilege escalation vulnerability, he dubbed the backdoor as " RootPipe ," in some versions of Mac OS X including the then newest version 10.10 Yosemite. The vulnerability ( CVE-2015-1130 ) could allow an attacker to take full control of your desktop Mac computer or MacBook laptop, even without any authentication. Keeping in mind the devastating effect of the RootPipe vulnerability, the researcher privately reported the flaw to Apple and did not disclose the details of the flaw publicly until the company released a patch to fix it. Apple did release an update but failed to patch RootPipe: Earlier this month, Apple released the latest version of Mac OS

If you're currently on a Mac computer and using a Chrome browser then a weird little Apple's OS X quirk, just a special thirteen-characters string could cause your tab in Chrome to crash instantly. A string of 13 characters (appear to be in Assyrian ), shown below in an image, is all needed to crash any tab in Chrome for OS X, however, this text has no impact on Windows, Android, or iOS operating systems. This Chrome crash vulnerability has already been reported by an open-source project Chromium project, which means that Google is likely aware of this troublesome issue. What steps will reproduce the problem? Any page with [ that special character ] will crash the chrome tab on a Mac. Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard. What is the expected result? Expect it not to crash What happens instead? It crashes Warning : Do not click on this link , which actually points to the bug report on the Chromiu

Apple's operating system is considered to be the most secure operating system whether it's Mac OS X for desktop computers or iOS for iPhones. But believe it or not, they are the most vulnerable operating system of year 2014. MOST VULNERABLE OPERATING SYSTEM  Windows, which is often referred to as the most vulnerable operating system in the world and also an easy pie for hackers, is not even listed on the top three vulnerable OS. According to an analysis by the network and security solutions provider GFI, the top three most vulnerable operating system are: Apple's Mac OS X Apple iOS Linux kernel GFI analysis is based on the data from the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD ), which shows that in 2014, the top three most vulnerable operating systems took owner by the following number of vulnerabilities reported in their software: Mac OS X - Total 147 vulnerabilities were reported, 64 of which were rated as high-severity Apple's iOS - Total 127 vulnerabilities were reported,

Apple is preparing to release the second update to OS X Yosemite in the coming days to its customers. The upcoming beta update OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 contains a patch for the Thunderstrike vulnerability that allows malware to be injected into Macs via the Thunderbolt port. Earlier this month, Reverse engineer Trammell Hudson revealed technical details and proof-of-concept of Thunderstrike attack . Thunderstrike, an undetectable bootkit, works by injecting an Option ROM into a Mac's EFI. It is possible because hardware attached to a system through Thunderbolt port are not as secure as a Mac itself. Once installed using Thunderstrike attack, the malware would be almost impossible to detect and remove. Because the firmware used on Macs doesn't always apply to the security of attached hardware. So "Apple had to change the code to not only prevent the Mac's boot ROM from being replaced, but also to prevent it from being rolled back to a state where the at

After exposing three critical zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Windows operating systems, Google's Project Zero vulnerability research program has revealed the existence of three more zero-day vulnerabilities, but this time, on Apple's OS X platform. The team has published three zero-day exploits for Apple's OS X, with sufficient information for an experienced hacker to exploit the bugs in an attack. Of course, the details about the zero-days were not released without alerting Apple to these issues. FIRST ZERO-DAY  VULNERABILITY The first flaw, " OS X networkd 'effective_audit_token' XPC type confusion sandbox escape ," allows an attacker to pass arbitrary commands to the networkd OS X system daemon because it does not check its input properly. The flaw may already have been mitigated in OS X Yosemite , but there is no clear explanation of whether this is the case. SECOND ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY The second and third vulnerability both are relate

A Swedish Security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in Apple's OS X Yosemite that gives hackers the ability to escalate administrative privileges on a compromised machine, and allows them to gain the highest level of access on a machine, known as root access. The vulnerability, dubbed as " Rootpipe ", was uncovered by Swedish white-hat hacker Emil Kvarnhammar , who is holding on the full details about the privilege escalation bug until January 2015, as Apple needs some time to prepare a security patch. " Details on the #rootpipe exploit will be presented, but not now. Let's just give Apple some time to roll out a patch to affected users, " Emil Kvarnhammar, IT specialist and hacker security company Truesec, tweeted from his twitter account. By exploiting the vulnerability in the Mac OS X Yosemite , an attacker could bypass the usual safeguard mechanisms which are supposed to stop anyone who tries to root the operating system through a tempora

Apple's latest desktop operating system, known as Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite , sends location and search data of users without their knowledge to Apple's remote servers by default whenever a user queries the desktop search tool Spotlight, which questions users' privacy once again. The technology firm faced criticism on Monday when users came to know about the company's About Spotlight & Privacy which clearly states that anyone who uses the Spotlight feature in either Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite or its newly launched mobile operating system iOS 8 will have their location and search information passed back to Apple's servers to process. APPLE COLLECTS USERS' DATA AND FORWARDS IT TO MICROSOFT AS WELL On one hand, where Apple decided to enable hard drive encryption by default, despite the FBI requests not to do so. But on the other, the company is itself putting its users' privacy on risk. The same data Apple collects from the users' searched te

A newly discovered zombie network that exclusively targets Apple computers running Mac OS X across the globe has compromised roughly 17,000 machines so far, giving hackers backdoor access to infected computers, researchers at Russian antivirus firm Dr.Web warned. According to a survey of traffic conducted in September by researchers at Dr. Web, over 17,000 Macs globally are part of the Mac.BackDoor.iWorm botnet , which creates a backdoor on machines running OS X. Researchers say almost a quarter of iWorm botnet are located in the US. The most interesting thing to notice about this botnet is that it uses a special method of spreading via a search service of Reddit posts to a Minecraft server list subreddit to collect the IP addresses for its command and control (CnC) network. The user who had posted that subreddit data has now been shut down though the malware creators are likely to form another server list. " It is worth mentioning that in order to acquire a control server add

On one hand where more than half of the Internet is considering the Bash vulnerability to be severe, Apple says the vast majority of Mac computer users are not at risk from the recently discovered vulnerability in the Bash command-line interpreter – aka the " Shellshock " bug that could allow hackers to take over an operating system completely. Apple has issued a public statement in response to this issue, assuring its OS X users that most of them are safe from any potential attacks through the ShellShock Vulnerability , which security experts have warned affect operating systems, including Mac's OS X. " The vast majority of OS X users are not at risk to recently reported bash vulnerabilities ," Apple said. " Bash, a UNIX command shell and language included in OS X, has a weakness that could allow unauthorized users to remotely gain control of vulnerable systems. With OS X, systems are safe by default and not exposed to remote exploits of bash unl