Security experts at Secunia are warning of a “highly critical” security vulnerability that affects Mac OS X.
The Mac OS X UDIF Memory Corruption Vulnerability is described as present even on fully up-to-date Intel Macs. It’s a flaw that can potentially be exploited by malicious local users to compromise a Mac’s security, they warn.
The report describes the flaw as “caused due to an error in com.apple.AppleDiskImageController when handling corrupted DMG image structures. This can be exploited to cause a memory corruption and may allow execution of arbitrary code in kernel-mode.”
However, all a user needs to do in order to protect themselves from the flaw is to disable the opening of safe files after downloading, the experts advise. This is a setting that can be adjusted in Safari Preferences.