Akatombo Web Log
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Mac OS X: Highly critical security flaw
From Jay Allen via Jim O’Connel of Wirefarm comes news of a very easy to exploit problem effecting pretty much all browsers in Mac OS X. This problem is extremely dangerous, and extremely easy to fix. If you are running Mac OS X, please go visit Jim’s post for information on how to fix it. He also has an example of the exploit on his site if you know and trust him enough to try it out, or understand by looking at the code what the link is going to do on your computer.
Boy, if this happens about about 3 times a week, it’ll be nearly as bad as windows 
UPDATE: Daring Fireball, on of my favorite websites on Macs and programming, has instructions for disabling this exploit that disable the exploit a bit more completely.
REUPDATE Daring Fireball has new, comprehensive instructions for fixing this problem. They include things that are not included in the Mac OS X security update (especially the Panther version which doesn’t fix the telnet hole for some reason) so I recomment having another look.