A security researcher has published details of an unpatched security vulnerability in Apple's operating system, claiming the computer maker has been sluggish in coming up with a fix. Details of an as-yet-unpatched security vulnerability in Apple's OS X software have been published on the Web.
The researcher who found the vulnerability, William Carrel, claims he was forced to release his advisory to the public before the development of a patch, in the interests of Apple users -- users he says have been "left exposed" by the company's sluggish response in developing a fix. He said Apple reneged on an agreed patch release date, then made him wait for weeks for the company to engineer a fix.
"Meanwhile, users are left exposed and independent rediscovery [of the vulnerability] seemed fairly likely... maybe by someone less scrupulous than myself," he wrote in the advisory. "I felt I was being strung along and that the issue may never get properly addressed so I set a hard deadline at that point. They didn't meet it, and I issued my advisory." Apple drew fire from the wider security community last month when it failed to provide a patch for its older "Jaguar" versions of its OS X operating system, affectively forcing customers to buy an upgrade to the company's latest version of OS X, or "Panther", to secure themselves against a series of security glitches discovered by US-based security research firm @Stake.
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News source: ZDNet UK
