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Apple plugs 88 Mac OS X security holes

In some scenarios, a malicious hacker could take complete control of a Mac-powered machine if a user simply views a malicious image or movie file.
Written by Ryan Naraine, Contributor

Apple today released one of its biggest Mac OS X security updates in recent memory, covering a whopping 88 documented vulnerabilities.

The Mac OS X v10.6.3 update, which is considered "critical," covers flaws that could lead to remote code execution, information disclosure and denial-of-service attacks.

In some scenarios, a malicious hacker could take complete control of a Mac-powered machine if a user simply views a malicious image or movie file.

In another case, a Mac user running spell-check could have his/her machine hijacked by hackers.

The update covers critical vulnerabilities in AppKit, QuickTime,CoreMedia, CoreTypes, DiskImages, ImageIO and Image RAW.

It also covers holes in several open-source components, including Apache, ClamAV, MySQL, PHP.

Here's the full list of the patched vulnerabilities.

The Security Update 2010-002 / Mac OS X v10.6.3 may be obtained from the Software Update pane in System Preferences, or Apple's Software Downloads web page.

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