Apple fixes five Mac OS X flaws exposed during Month of Apple Bugs project

Apple has offered fixes for five critical vulnerabilities unveiled during January's Month of Apple Bugs (MoAB) project. Thursday’s security update, Apple’s second of the year, affects Macintosh OS X versions 13.9 and 14.8. The patches seal a hole in Finder, which can be exploited to cause an application crash or run arbitrary code if a user is duped into mounting a maliciously crafted disk image. Finder is an application that controls Mac desktop processes.

The update also corrects two null-pointer errors in the instant messenger client, iChat, which could be exploited to create an application crash. Another iChat fix resolves a format string vulnerability that, if a user clicks on the maliciously crafted URL, could lead to arbitrary code execution.

The final patch seals up a privilege-escalation condition in which the UserNotificationCenter can be exploited to allow a local user to overwrite or change system files.