Serious Leopard OS 10.5 Security Issues

[Steven H. Blackwell]

[color:red]Various sources over the past couple of days have been reporting on two serious issues with OS X 10.5 Leopard that can dramatically adversely affect the security of computers and networks as well as the availability and integrity of data.

Summarized briefly, these are as follows:

1. Leopard disables firewalls and opens all ports.

2. Moving files from one directory to another can result in total loss of all data.

I recommend everyone's reading a couple of these reports and then assess whether your specific situation is vulnerable to one of these problems.

This excerpt is from today's http://www.macwindows.com site.

A number of sources around the Internet are reporting a bug in Leopard that deletes data when the OS is interrupted during a file move between volumes. If you are moving (but not copying) a file, group of files, or a folder between volumes and the connection stopped during the move, Leopard will delete the files/folder form the original volume as well as the new volume. The move can occur between local drives or between local and network storage.

The bug has been reported by Macintouch, eWeek, and others. The workaround is to do a copy instead of a move, then delete the original.

Also these links:

http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/movebug.html

http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/98492

Steven

[Vaughan]

Et tu, Leopard?