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.

MAC OS X Yosemite zero-dayMAC OS X Yosemite zero-day

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)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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