Apple Patches Patch

Three days after Apple Computer, Inc. unveiled a security update for Mac OS X, it rolled out a fix for the fix by posting a v1.1 of the patches.

Thursday, Apple published Security Update 2006-002 v1.1 Mac OS X 10.4.5 as a correction for owners of PowerPC-equipped Macs. (No v1.1 exists for the 2006-002 update targeting Intel-based machines.)

With no details forthcoming from Apple, Johannes Ullrich, the chief research officer for SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, theorized that v1.1 fixed missed issues in the open-source packages (rsync and php), and also "likely fixed more issues related to the 'safe file execution' problem."

That problem, which affected Mac OS X and Apple's Safari Web browser, was first patched earlier this month, just a week after the zero-day vulnerability was made public.

Some Mac users, however, reported network and Internet performance problems after installing Monday's update. On an official Apple forum, several noted that the v1.1 fix of Thursday return network and Internet speeds to normal. Other threads on the same forum mentioned problems with utility crashes and an refusal of the OS to mount disk partitions.