Apple patches 21 Mac OS X vulnerabilities
Apple Inc. today patched 21 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, including seven flaws in Flash that the popular media player's maker, Adobe Systems Inc., fixed more than a month ago.
Security Update 2008-008, which was released today as part of a broader refresh of Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard, and available separately for users of Mac OS X 10.4, known as Tiger, quashes bugs in Apple Type Services, the CoreGraphics rendering component, the kernel, LibSystem and other pieces of the operating system.
At least half a dozen of the patches were tagged by Apple with its usual "arbitrary code execution" phrasing, a sign that the vulnerabilities are serious and, if exploited, could result in a hacker hijacking a machine. While all 21 of the vulnerabilities affect Leopard, which was updated to Version 10.5.6, only 15 of them affect Tiger, Apple's oldest still-supported operating system.
