Apple announced on Tuesday the availability of macOS Sierra 10.12.2, which patches a total of 72 vulnerabilities affecting various components of the operating system.
The latest version addresses flaws related to components such as Apache, Audio, Bluetooth, the kernel, IOKit, IOSurface, IOAcceleratorFamily, IOHIDFamily, Disk Images, graphics components, media services, security, and several third-party libraries.
macOS Sierra 10.12.2 also addresses the cURL vulnerabilities discovered recently during an audit sponsored by the Mozilla Secure Open Source (SOS) program.
The security holes patched with this macOS update can be exploited to cause an application to enter a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, execute arbitrary code (including with elevated privileges), obtain sensitive information, escalate privileges, leak memory data, and overwrite existing files. RC4 and 3DES have been removed as default ciphers to prevent attackers from exploiting their weaknesses.
Independent researchers and representatives of Tencent, Synopsys Software Integrity Group, Google Project Zero, Huawei, Alipay, Qihoo 360, Topsec, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), INRIA Paris and CXSECURITY have been credited for reporting the flaws. Ian Beer of Google Project Zero and the researcher known online as “daybreaker@Minionz” have found many of the flaws.
This is the second security update released by Apple for macOS Sierra since its launch in September. The first update fixed only 16 vulnerabilities.
Apple also announced on Tuesday security updates for iCloud for Windows, iTunes for Windows and the Safari web browser. Safari 10.0.2 resolves two dozen vulnerabilities, a large majority of which affect the WebKit engine. The same WebKit flaws have also been fixed in the Windows versions of iCloud and iTunes.
On Monday, Apple released iOS 10.2, tvOS 10.1 and watchOS 3.1.1, but the Apple Watch update was quickly pulled after users reported that it bricked their devices.
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