Apple patches 31 OSX holes

MAKER OF COLOURED plastic toys, Apple has today patched up 31 security flaws in various versions of its Mac OS X operating system.

Twelve of the 22 patched software components suffer from flaws that could allow for remote code execution. Other fixes deal with vulnerabilities ranging from denial of service attacks to system privilege escalation.

Updates for third-party open source components accounted for seven of the fixed components. Perl, openSSL, and gnuzip all received fixes in the update.

Apple's Security Framework software received four patches in the update, though none of the vulnerabilities could allow for remote code execution and only two affected the most recent version of the operating system.

Some known holes remain, however. Researcher H. Moore alerted the world to an Airport vulnerability on the first day of his Month of Kernal Bugs (MoKB) project, and this has been fixed. But other vulnerabilities unearthed by the sniffer Moore remain wide open, it seems. µ