Apple Mac OS X no more vulnerable to ShellShock security bug

Apple recently released a patch that protects its Mac users from well-known Shell Shock BASH shell bug. The bug that was discovered by the security researchers a few days ago was affecting UNIX-like and Linux machines, and Apple’s flagship OS falls into that category.

Previously Apple said that most of the Mac users are safe from Bash bug. Company said that the OS X has in-built mechanism that protects its users from remote exploits. The firewall mechanism in the Mavericks and previous generation of the Mac OS X do not allow external attacks. However, the company has now released a patch for the Mavericks, OS X Lion and Mountain Lion software.

Apple last week said, “”Bash, a UNIX command shell and language included in OS X, has a weakness that could allow unauthorized users to remotely gain control of vulnerable systems,” Apple said last week. “With OS X, systems are safe by default and not exposed to remote exploits of bash unless users configure advanced UNIX services.”

BASH bug, which has been dubbed as Shell Shock, is a vulnerability that allows the execution of arbitrary code and can allow a hacker to gain root access of the system. Few of the researchers compared it to the HeartBleed bug. “Shell Shock is incredibly easy to exploit,” Jeremiah Grossman, chief executive officer of Santa Clara-based Internet security company, “Compromise of one affected system can automatically spread to another vulnerable system. If this is the case, Shell Shock could easily turn out to be a much bigger problem than Heartbleed.”

Most the Linux OS by different vendors have already received a patch of for this bug that was released on Friday.

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