An Italian expert discovered two zero-day flaws in MAC OS X

An Italian security researcher has discovered two zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple MAC OS X that could be exploited to gain remote access to a PC.

An Italian teenager, Luca Todesco, has found a couple of critical zero-day vulnerabilities in Apple OS X operating system that could be exploited to gain remote access to a PC.

The expert discovered the security flaws in Apple OS X after Apple issued a security update of the MAC OS X Yosemite v10.10.5 (Security Update 2015-006) that fixed a local privilege escalation vulnerability that was used by some miscreants to load questionable programs onto computers.

Todesco, published the exploit code he developed on GitHub, it triggers two vulnerabilities to cause a memory corruption in OS X’s kernel and circumvent the kernel address space layout randomization (kASLR) used to prevent buffer overflow attacks.

The code published on GitHub also includes a patch called NULLGuard.

According Todesco, the attacker can run the exploit code to gain a root shell on the target OS X machine.

The exploit code works in OS X versions 10.9.5 through 10.10.5, the version OS X 10.11 fixed it.

Todesco reported the security issues to Apple “a few hours before the exploit was published.”

“This is not due to me having issues with Apple’s patch policies/time frames, as others have incorrectly reported,” Todesco wrote.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Mac OS X, zero-day)