Moving up the list, the not-a-security-fix I mentioned above is included, almost as an afterthought, as follows: Presumably, Apple yielded to public pressure to fix this long-running hole, but, instead of taking all the sudo changes from the past few months, just backported the sudo -k fix to version 1.7.4p6, a much less risky change. Until 10.8.4, doing a sudo -k (which is supposed to deauthenticate you, and thus does not require a password), followed by setting the time to just after midnight on, would give you root access. Nevertheless, the sudo binary has been updated, and in my tests, the privilege escalation bug had vanished. The infamous sudo privilege escalation, documented and patched by sudo itself back in February and pointedly exposed on OS X by Metasploit last month, is no more.Ĭonfusingly, if you run sudo -V to check the version number, you might get the impression it hasn’t been updated, since 1.7.4p6a has the same core version string as the version shipped with 10.8.4 ( 1.7.4p6). I’ll start with the free bonus patch, because I’m delighted it’s happened and I think you should know about it.

There are 15 official security patches, one fix that Apple has appended to the list without explicitly admitting that it was a security issue, and one bonus patch that is mentioned on Apple’s website but not in its emailed security advisory. I’m calling it a security update, though it’s officially a full-on point release of OS X Mountain Lion, taking the 10.8 variant of Apple’s OS X to version 10.8.5.īut with twice as many security fixes listed as regular bug fixes and improvements, I’m happy to call it a “security update,” if only in the hope you’ll feel a bit more urgency about deploying it.

Os x 10.8