Happy Northern Solstice everyone which occurred at the beginning of my Saturday shift.  There has been a lot of discussion this week concerning Apple addressing the Safari for windows desktop download issue.

However, there has been very little discussion about the Apple Remote Desktop root privilege escalation vulnerability announced on slashdot a few days ago.  The gist of the problem is that the Apple Remote Desktop agent takes commands from apple scripting language and does not appropriately drop the root privileges.  As a result, a local user or a user application could use a specially crafted command to download or execute code of the attackers choosing. 

Most people may discount this as not that notable due to the lack of remote exploitation.  However, I would like to remind our readers that local exploits like this can be leveraged into the second phase of a remote exploit through a web browser, or other user level application vulnerability.  Additionally, in a multi-user/server based environment (and especially those of us in university or library environment where we check out laptops or manage computer labs), a dishonest student or insider could use this exploit to gain elevated access and wreck all types of havoc.

Until Apple releases an update, I would recommend that you either use the stopgap measure listed in the slashdot article or the more elegant one mentioned in Brian Krebs Security Fix blog at the washingtonpost.com.