FrSIRT, a French computer security outfit, is reporting a new denial of service vulnerability on everyone’s favorite OS.
As it reports: “A vulnerability has been identified in Apple Mac OS X, which could be exploited by local attackers to cause a denial of service. 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.”
DoS attacks aren’t fun for anyone — so we’re guessing that Cupertino is looking at this exploit and is on the case. But, as per usual, be careful out on them Internets.
People who are logged in to your machine may be able to crash it ... cue ominous music.
Ideally your system will never kernel panic. Apple should fix the issue. But, calling this a "DoS" attack doesn't add much to the report. Every kernel panic represents a potential DoS.