{"id":73,"date":"2007-12-14T10:19:52","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T08:19:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intego.com\/2007\/12\/14\/new-mac-os-x-denial-of-service-vulnerabilities\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:17:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T19:17:54","slug":"new-mac-os-x-denial-of-service-vulnerabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intego.com\/mac-security-blog\/new-mac-os-x-denial-of-service-vulnerabilities\/","title":{"rendered":"New Mac OS X Denial of Service Vulnerabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

FrSIRT has published information about a new denial of service vulnerability<\/a> it has discovered in Mac OS X. As they say, “This issue is caused by errors in the “cs_validate_page()” function when processing return values of “hashes()”, which could be exploited by malicious users to panic a vulnerable system and create a denial of service condition via a specially crafted Mach-O binary.”<\/p>\n

What this means is that a malicious user could basically overwhelm your Mac. Denial of service occurs when, for example, a computer receives too many requests on a network, and its processor becomes overloaded. While the term is most often used to talk about web sites – there have been cases when hundreds or even thousands of computers have been used to “attack” a specific web site, all sending requests at the same time, so the server cannot respond – this can also affect individual computers. However, the risk is very low that someone would bother to attack a given Mac, unless it is being used as a server. <\/p>\n

At the same time, another denial of service vulnerability has been found<\/a>, this one being a “flaw is an integer overflow in the load_threadstack function in mach_loader.c when processing Mach-O binaries, which can lead to a kernel panic.” <\/p>\n

Kernel panics are more troubling, as you lose all your work when this occurs. If you’ve never seen one, it looks like this:<\/p>\n

When this occurs, you have to force-shut-down your Mac by pressing and holding the power button. It’s the worst type of crash, because you’ll lose any unsaved files.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FrSIRT has published information about a new denial of service vulnerability it has discovered in Mac OS X. As they say, “This issue is caused by errors in the “cs_validate_page()” function when processing return values of “hashes()”, which could be exploited by malicious users to panic a vulnerable system and create a denial of service […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-apple","category-security-privacy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t