Apple Patches Critical Flaw in Mac OS X

Apple's Mac OS X operating system is known for being stable and problem-free but it appears some critical bugs still exist here and there

OS X Yosemite

Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is known for being stable and problem-free but it appears some critical bugs still exist here and there – Apple has just released an update for OS X Mountain Lion v10.8.5, OS X Mavericks v10.9.5, and OS X Yosemite v10.10.1 that fixes a critical issue with the Network Time Protocol (NTP) service in OS X.

The update can be downloaded via the “Updates” section of the Mac App Store.

After the update installation you can see if everything is OK – just run the following command in the terminal:

what/usr/sbin/ntpd

Users who run OS X Mountain Lion will see ntp-77.1.1 as the updated build and if you run Mavericks and Yosemite you should see version 88.1.1 and 92.5.1, respectively. The update fixes several issues that exist in ntpd that allow an attacker to trigger buffer overflows. Apple now says these issues are addressed through better error checking.

A few months ago Apple released an update for OS X Mavericks, Lion, and Mountain Lion to fix the Shellshock bug

in the Bash software, which is used in Unix-based systems. As you can see Mac OS X is not as problem-free as many people think.

Republished with permission from HiTechReview. Read the original.