Secunia Issues Alert For Five OS X Vulnerabilities

Secunia has announced an alert for five Mac OS X vulnerabilities uncovered by Tom Ferris, who runs the Security-Protocols Web site. The weaknesses could enable an outsider to launch a denial of service attack and compromise a useris computer, according to Secunia.

The issues include errors in Safari when handling malformed HTML tags and malformed GIF images and a problem when decompressing malformed ZIP archives through the Finder. In addition, an issue exists with processing malformed BMP images in Safari or Preview, and errors exist in two functions for handling malformed TIFF images in Preview, Finder, QuickTime, or Safari.

Users are advised to not visit untrustworthy Web sites and to avoid opening images and ZIP archives from unknown sources. Secunia noted that these issues appear in Mac OS X v10.4.6 and that "other versions may also be affected."