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posted by takyon on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the escalation dept.

Hackers are exploiting a serious zero-day vulnerability in the latest version of Apple's OS X so they can install adware applications without requiring victims to enter system passwords, researchers said. As Ars reported last week, the privilege-escalation bug stems from new error-logging features that Apple added to OS X 10.10. Developers didn't use standard safeguards involving additions to the OS X dynamic linker dyld, a failure that lets attackers open or create files with root privileges that can reside anywhere in the OS X file system. It was disclosed last week by security researcher Stefan Esser. On Monday, researchers from anti-malware firm Malwarebytes said a new malicious installer is exploiting the vulnerability to surreptitiously infect Macs with several types of adware including VSearch, a variant of the Genieo package, and the MacKeeper junkware. Malwarebytes researcher Adam Thomas stumbled on the exploit after finding the installer modified the sudoers configuration file. In a blog post, Malwarebytes researchers wrote:

[...] The real meat of the script, though, involves modifying the sudoers file. The change made by the script allows shell commands to be executed as root using sudo, without the usual requirement for entering a password.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:44AM (#218376)

    Then *it's not your computer any more*.

    Stop running malicious installers, and the problem goes away. Only install software from known trusted sites, be that through signed packages, or signed source repos. If you can't be bothered, then you can't be bothered with security. So you have no right to complain about *any* security-related consequences.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:39PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:39PM (#218496) Journal
    It's a privilege escalation flaw, so it can potentially be used to gain root from an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in an unsandboxed browser (for example. Though on OS X, that basically means Firefox, as Chrome and Safari both run the renderer in a sandboxed process that isn't able to exploit this particular vulnerability). That said, most Macs are basically single-user systems, so if you have the ability to use this exploit, you already have the ability to do all of the damage that the user is likely to care about.
    --
    sudo mod me up