Safari 10.1.1, pushed out as part of today’s minor macOS Sierra 10.12.5 software update, fixes yet another instance of address bar spoofing. This is good news because the browser can now protect you from phishing attacks that would typically attempt to fool you into believing you were visiting a genuine website rather than a maliciously crafted webpage.
According to the company’s security document, the software fixes a flaw where visiting a malicious website may lead to address bar spoofing. “An inconsistent user interface issue was addressed with improved state management,” states Apple.
Even folks who are extremely mindful of phishing are susceptible to address bar spoofing.
The sophistication of today’s phishing attacks came to light when Chinese security researcher Xudong Zheng demonstrated how easily users could be fooled into visiting a fake website that seemingly shows the correct URL in the address bar.
To protect yourself from such attacks in the future, manually type in the URL of the website you want to visit or choose your favorite website from Safari’s Bookmarks menu. Of course, you should avoid clicking any suspicious links in an email message, even if they appear to originate from a contact you personally know.
The patched vulnerability was discovered in Safari for macOS, not for iOS.
Apple credits Zhiyang Zeng and Yuyang Zhou of Tencent Security Platform Department with the discovery of the vulnerability CVE-2017-2500 and Zhiyang Zeng of Tencent Security Platform Department with the discovery of the vulnerability CVE-2017-2511.
Moreover, Safari 10.1.1 fixed an issue in Safari’s history menu that could lead to an application denial of service after visiting a maliciously crafted webpage. The issue was addressed through improved memory handling.
Lastly, Safari 10.1.1 also includes patches for as many as seven vulnerabilities that were discovered in the WebKit rendering engine, five of which dealing with universal cross site scripting, while fixing an issue with WebKit’s Web Inspector where an app could execute unsigned code.
Safari 10.1.1 is available for OS X Yosemite 10.10.5, OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 and macOS Sierra 10.12.5. Apple also released a minor update to iTunes for Mac and Windows today.
iTunes 12.6.1 contains unspecified app and performance improvements and a fix for a WebKit exploit on Windows 7 and later which could result in arbitrary code execution after processing maliciously crafted web content.