Crashing a Mac Easily

crashing-a-mac

So… you thought that OSX was the most stable OS ever developed… right?. Guess what… you can crash it super easily. Just try the following…

  • Open any OSX app. For instance, Safari.
  • Type in the location bar the following string:  File:///
  • See the crash onscreen?

It’s been reported in OpenRadar, and astonishingly, it’s only affecting the latest incarnation of OSX, Mountain Lion. You can crash Chrome, Safari… and probably, any app you’ve got installed.

What’s all the fuzz about?. Crashes can be used to get ownership of the IP pointer.. which is, in layman terms, the guy that says what-to-execute next. Long short story, this could potentially be used to develop an exploit, to scale permissions in the system.

Let’s wait for a patch… 10.8.3 is taking quite a long time to ship.

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