'It took seven months for Apple to patch this latest vulnerability in Safari, despite numerous opportunities for it to be addressed in updates that were already scheduled,' he said. He took Apple to task for the way it handles reports of security vulnerabilities, and patches its software. These two factors should have indicated to Apple that this vulnerability carried a high risk.' 'I discovered it accidentally, which indicates that this issue could also be discovered by others. 'This vulnerability.does not require intricate knowledge of the processor or operating system to exploit,' Masterbrook said today. Attacks based on tempting users to a rogue site are commonplace on the Internet, although the vast majority of them are aimed at Windows users. All criminals had to do, said Masterbrook, was dupe users into visiting such a site. The RSS vulnerability - present in both the Mac and Windows versions of the browser - could be used to introduce attack code from a malicious Web site. Masterbrook had posted some information about the bug, as well as a workaround to temporarily disable the RSS feed feature in the browser, in a Jan.

'After six months passed without a fix, I decided to post a warning on January 11, 2009, due to my judgment that this issue could be exploited at any time as long as it remained unfixed,' Masterbrook said in an entry to his blog Thursday, after Apple had delivered its updates. The year's first bug updates from Apple patched 48 security vulnerabilities in the company's operating system and its components, four in Apple's implementation of Sun Microsystems' Java, two non-security flaws it admitted it had introduced with faulty code in Mac OS X 10.5.6, and one fix it said was a 'proactive security measure.' The majority of the bugs - 32 altogether - were in open-source components or software not originally crafted by Apple, as in the case of the quartet of Java flaws.īut the Safari vulnerability may be the one most people remember.Īccording to Brian Masterbrook, one of the three researchers Apple credited with reporting the Safari bug, Apple had information about the flaw more than seven months ago.

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