Apple patches 304 flaws, including an exploited Core Graphics bug

Apple’s latest patch round addresses a large number of vulnerabilities across its operating systems, with the vendor noting 304 distinct fixes. The briefing highlights that while vulnerability counts per release have risen in comparison with some other vendors, Apple’s uptick is not as dramatic as seen elsewhere. Among the patches, one issue in Core Graphics is already being exploited and was previously addressed for current iOS versions; the new release now also covers older iOS variants, including iOS 18.

Two additional items are flagged as noteworthy: an access-to-camera vulnerability that may not require user permissions, and a local attacker potentially gaining access to a user’s Keychain items. The update does not appear to break out fixes by CVE or component, but is framed as a general OS-wide security update rather than discrete patches for individual flaws.

The diary portion of the broadcast covers Jeffray Spence’s note on threat hunting within the DShield SIEM honeypot, which uses Elasticsearch and the Elastic frontend. The piece demonstrates methods for spotting threats, for example by inspecting Accept-Language headers in HTTP requests to isolate traffic that might reveal language-specific threat activity, and then correlating related events to identify actors.

Separately, the podcast revisits last week’s Brotli-related concerns: Microsoft issued an out-of-band patch for .NET (covering .NET 8, 9 and 10, and RC3 for 11) to address a Brotli decompression vulnerability. PHP, while not implementing Brotli itself, uses the library in Windows, and the PHP project repackaged Windows binaries with the updated Brotli library without changing the library version, meaning hash verification is advised to ensure the up-to-date, fixed library is in use.